You know a good thing when you see it — and when you saw Alteryx, it was love at first sight. You were ready to propose a permanent relationship from the first moment of your free trial. Now it’s time to make the case for Alteryx to your manager.
Put on your “boss” hat
For managers, the case for new software is all about the business benefits it delivers. So when you’re pitching technology like Alteryx, stick to results.
For example, explain how automation streamlines your biggest analysis bottlenecks, like finding, prepping, and blending data. As a result, your team generates game-changing insights and fuels better business outcomes more quickly. That’s a winning argument.
How does expanding your analytic capacity help your manager? Here is a quick checklist to keep handy as you make your pitch:
- Time saved
- Better data
- Faster answers
- Better insights
- More questions answered
But to really drive home your case, nothing’s quite as powerful as social proof laced with hard data. Get ready to open your pitch with stories of how companies like TOYO Engineering automated complex engineering processes with Alteryx or how Fender used Alteryx to improve data analysis, better understand customers, and predict demand.
TOYO Engineering automates complex engineering processes.
TOYO Engineering, a prominent Japanese engineering, procurement, and construction company, used Alteryx to automate complex engineering processes, significantly enhancing efficiency and accuracy.
Before using Alteryx, extracting and processing data from TOYO’s extensive databases involved combining numerous tables using SQL, followed by manual processing in Excel. This was time-consuming, resource-intensive, and prone to human error, leading to delays and costly reworks.
TOYO Engineering automated these tasks by adopting Alteryx Server and Designer, connecting Alteryx directly with their 3D modeling software through APIs. This automation resulted in an 85% reduction in manual work and saved over 38,000 hours in design generation. Engineers can now create multiple reports simultaneously, ensuring more accurate and timely data handling, improving design quality, and reducing risk.
Fender improves customer engagement with data analytics
Fender Musical Instruments Corporation (Fender), the designer of iconic guitars used by musicians like Jimi Hendrix and Kurt Cobain, used Alteryx, Tableau, and AWS to revolutionize its data analytics approach, better understand their customers, streamline data processing, and predict demand.
Fender’s target demographic is diverse and rapidly changing, so they created an analytic process using their vast data sources to give them better insight into their market.
By integrating Alteryx with multiple data sources, Fender reduced data processing times, enabling faster report generation and richer customer insights. Alteryx’s automation capabilities helped Fender efficiently manage workflows, optimize marketing and supply chain processes, and build predictive models for demand forecasting. Additionally, Alteryx facilitated detailed churn analysis for Fender’s subscription services, allowing them to understand customers better and improve engagement strategies.
Now make your personal case for Alteryx
The success of TOYO and Fender isn’t an anomaly. You could tell story after story just like it. But now it’s time to switch to your company’s “Before Alteryx” story and paint the picture of your dramatic pain points.
The time you and other analysts in your company waste finding, prepping, and blending data imposes an artificial ceiling on the quantity and complexity of the questions that your organization can ask. IDC reports that 75% of data loses value within days, 33% don’t use the data they receive, and 70% say that data is underutilized.
So, to make the business case for Alteryx, start measuring how much time you spend finding, prepping, and blending data for new and repeating analysis processes . Don’t forget to include the time you spend recreating the wheel, aka building information assets that may already exist but you don’t have access to them. That will help you make the numerical case for how much time you’ll save — and therefore how much more you’ll achieve — using the Alteryx AI Platform for Enterprise Analytics.
Anticipate tough questions
If a breakdown of your typical schedule is shocking news to your manager, they will immediately start firing questions at you. Why does it take so long to gather data? Why can’t you trust the data you find? Why is the majority of your time spent prepping and blending? Why does so little actually get done during the week?
In answering those questions, stay confident and resist the temptation to turn the pitch into a venting session. You’ve faced major hurdles in finding, prepping, and blending data. You spend hours hunting for data because there’s no easy way to find out whether there’s a single, trusted source for all the data you need. After finally locating what you need, you spend more hours wrangling data using manual processes, leaving little time to produce the requested report, let alone answer more questions. But you’re pitching your key to freedom — the Alteryx AI Platform for Enterprise Analytics — so stay focused. The result: although you had 30 hours during the week to work on business problems, only six hours — 20% of the time – was spent analyzing data.
You kick off week two with perhaps a few analytic tasks to tackle, including that weekly repeating analysis — and because it’s not automated, you need to redo the prep and blend steps.
This week, you only had time to complete two new analyses — one fewer than the previous week. That’s because you still needed to prep and blend data to repeat one of your reports, and those steps alone took 10 hours — a third of your available time. And uh-oh, you find out that you’ve got another report that will need to be repeated weekly.
In week three, you’ll have two repeating analyses, leaving even less time for new questions. You’re painfully aware that each repeated analysis eats into the time available to solve new problems, leaving less and less time to produce valuable insights as time goes on.
The benefits multiply. You continue to realize the same level of time savings on each new task — but there’s an even bigger benefit for repeating analyses. Because you previously stored those problems as automated Alteryx workflows, you’ve eliminated prep and blend, freeing up those hours for new analysis. As a result, your analytic capacity has increased substantially: you have time to tackle questions more complicated than you ever dreamed possible and to learn predictive skills for even more advanced analysis instead of wasting your time on repetitive manual work. You’re looking forward to the road ahead — and so is your boss, who thinks you’re a veritable goldmine!
Sum up the benefits … and the cost of doing nothing
We’ve got your back. We’re here to help you make the all-important pitch to your boss — so you can deliver the insights management needs and get what you want (Alteryx). So here’s a quick summary of how to convince them. The “before” and “after” comparisons are powerful tools. Then, put your “boss” hat on and consider your manager’s most pressing goals.
It may also help to remind your boss that because you can ask more questions, you can hone in on the right ones—the ones that deliver critical insights and enable better decisions. With Alteryx, you’re solving problems that once seemed impossible. We know you’ll be successful, and we can’t wait to help you conquer the world of advanced analytics.