Even if you don't belong to this type of employee, the process is probably familiar to you: Periodically created reports depend on individual employees. If they fail, things get tedious. If you are one of these particularly important employees, let us tell you: We don't want to replace you with systems, but we do want to simplify your work so that you have more time for activities that really add value. More insightful analysis work instead of time-consuming, manual data merging - doesn't that sound tempting? 

Time-consuming, manually laborious and individual-dependent periodic reports contradict the idea of data-driven companies that understand how to maximize the benefits of digitization with modern technologies and automate processes around data.  

In our blog we explain you how to work with Alteryx  Data processes completely automated and show you in a comparison 7 reasons why the time has come for heavy Excel users to support their analysis work with a tool that not only automates their work, but also significantly simplifies it.

1. The Use Case: Periodic Excel Reports in a Retail Company

The use case described below is intended to be easier to follow, but is representative of companies and divisions in different industries where many periodic reports are generated.

Company

Internationally active company with headquarters in Switzerland and 3 subsidiaries in Europe and one each in Asia and the USA. Active in the field of trade with products for the construction industry, but also manufactures a device itself and also offers services around various devices. Has bought up many small companies in recent years and is now integrating them on an ongoing basis.

Controlling 

Central controlling by 5 employees at the headquarters. In addition to ad-hoc evaluations, the employees prepare the following periodic reports:

Data

Due to the heterogeneous, non-integrated system landscape, periodic reports involve a lot of manual work for data preparation. 

• Data sources: Most of the data comes from the company-wide ERP. In addition, however, some of the purchased companies still have their own systems. The data comes in by mail, is stored in Sharepoint or is exported directly from the ERP. In addition, there is data from other source systems (Google Analytics, CRM, etc.). 
• File formats: Predominantly Excel but also CSV, XML and proprietary file formats. 
• Merge data: Manual copy & paste transfer of information into aggregated Excel data sheets. Many reports are also referenced to other sources with SVERWEISEN etc. (e.g. foreign currencies).  
• Clean Data: Data must be cleaned (deleting blank rows and invalid values, etc.), file formats converted from XML to Excel, etc. 

2. Problem definition Reporting with Excel

In this use case, the following challenges arise in the context of reporting with Excel: 

• Strong dependency: Only the employee responsible for reporting can carry it out. This is problematic in case of absences, because substitutions are costly (know-how, traceability of reports, data sources, local storage). 
• Lack of transparency: Data set contains complex formulas. These were created by the predecessor and are difficult to understand by the employee responsible today. 
• Lack of automation: Macros are not user-friendly (know-how not available) and not stable (change paths and source systems, every Excel update brings problems). 
• Lack of ability to share data: Files are stored locally. When the employee is absent, team colleagues have no access. Data is mainly sent by mail. 
• Error proneness: Frequent troubleshooting because formulas like SVERWEISE and macros do not work anymore. 
• Time-consuming, manual data preparation: Merging data and cleaning it up is a large part of the work.  
• Poor performance and limited scalability: Large amounts of data are loaded or referenced even though not all of it is needed for reporting. This results in long loading times and system crashes. 
• Ad hoc reporting: Everyone designs new reports from scratch, because it is not possible to build on the reports of other employees. This leads to a lot of extra work and is not scalable. 
• Knowledge build-up: Employees create different reports. Due to the lack of a central platform / repository, it is not possible to benefit from the work of others (loss of efficiency and knowledge building). 

3. Seven reasons why Alteryx is preferable to Excel

In the following, we will show how the problems shown can be easily solved with the use of Alteryx.

4. Cost/benefit calculation for the introduction of Alteryx

For the calculation of the business case, we assumed one employee and focused on the savings through automation of processes and data processing.  

The following cost/benefit calculation shows the average effort per periodic report of one employee. If we assume an average annual salary of CHF 100,000 for the employee, this results in annual costs of around CHF 14,600 due to the non-automation of the reports.  

By automating the data processes with Alteryx, around 256 working hours of an employee can be used elsewhere, and around CHF 8,900 in costs can be saved. The freed-up work capacity can be used for the further development of the company and thus new topics can be dealt with. 

In addition, with the multitude of possibilities in Alteryx, analyses can be made in the future that were previously not possible or only possible in a very complicated way due to the lack of possibilities. For example, geodata analysis, text mining of PDFs, predictive analytics, etc. 

Conclusion 

The automation of data processes with Alteryx makes sense for recurring activities with data even with very low effort. On the one hand through the cost savings, but above all through the new possibilities in the processing of data. In departments such as controlling, for example, the prerequisites are quickly met. In addition to standard reports, efficiency gains in data preparation and analysis can be achieved, especially in ad-hoc evaluations. Furthermore, Alteryx enables its users to become data experts and thus increases the analysis competence in the company.  

Would you like to learn more about the possibilities and whether Alteryx is suitable for your use case? We will be happy to advise you.  

Learn more about Alteryx.