Editor’s Note: The X Factor is a blog series featuring data rockstars and their everyday challenges and solutions.
This blog features Dave Elliott, Global Solutions and Data Innovation Manager, Mayborn Group, Alteryx Innovator, and Alteryx Core-certified user for six years and counting.
At Mayborn Group, the #1 baby brand in the UK and Australia, their two flagship brands — Tommee Tippee and Gro — are “born out of innovation and ideas that solve real parenting challenges, every day.”
But it’s not just pacifiers and bottles that make this happen. As Global Solutions and Data Innovation Manager for Mayborn Group, Dave Elliott is helping solve real business challenges every day with analytics.
In addition to the brands they manage internally, Mayborn processes EPOS data from over 50 global retailers to help understand market and customer behaviors at a global, regional and retailer level, with billions of rows of data flowing through the process. Augmenting this data with market share data from 3rd parties such as Nielsen, to provide a holistic baby category analytics platform. Before Alteryx, this was a retailer by retailer manual process.
Now here’s where Dave and Mayborn’s analytics story might sound quite familiar — these were manual, mundane, time-intensive tasks, with siloed approaches, and no single version of the truth — they were living in spreadsheet hell. (Can you feel their pain?)
What they needed was a tool to help them better understand behaviors and activities holistically to narrow in on details by regions and promotions and automate processes to remove churn from the equation and prepare end users to present the results in a clean visual way.
He was looking for an analytics platform that would eliminate these challenges and reflected on his prior experience with Alteryx.
He knew he struck gold.
“Choosing Alteryx was one of those ‘Eureka!’ moments — the Platform is flexible and agile to meet our business needs with the ease to answer any question and provide solutions to help drive strategic direction,” says Dave.
“Alteryx is at the core of our analytics; it’s the engine that sits behind our business analytics strategy. It serves as our single version of truth, bringing in data to one single picture of how the market is moving and allows us to focus on critical areas such as product quality and competitors to be more agile in marketplace,” exclaims Dave.
Through the automation of EPOS data with Alteryx, Mayborn Group was able to save around a day per month for about 10 analysts within 4-5 areas of the business, and that’s just one project.
“We were able to democratize data by pushing it out to the end user, providing solutions that give time back to analysts so they can focus on analyzing data. We’re building a world class centralized analytics team focused on this piece of the puzzle,” says Dave. “This has allowed us to see gains and efficiencies in bringing data together and improving its quality — we’re now able to surface quality challenges and rectify and improve performance. Talk about a huge pride moment,” says Dave.
A big part of Mayborn Group’s success can be attributed to their understanding that data literacy is invaluable, not only to people, but the business as a whole.
“We recognize that data literacy is not just for the analyst, but a huge benefit to everyone who is part of the business. We’re currently working on a transformational program to help grow a culture of analytics where the people perspective is at the heart of it,” states Dave.
Dave’s X-Factor
His ability to think outside of the box for a view of the bigger picture to help provide solutions that address and answer tough business challenges.
Even though Dave has a strategic role now, he’s still able to get his hands in and create workflows.
“Our campaign and ecommerce projects (pulling consumer and product data/account sign-ups through ecommerce site) really pushed me out of my comfort zone — from learning how to build macros, parse marketing data out of documents which avoided someone having to copy and paste 300 SKUs of data from Word docs and into Python and building workflows in Alteryx that read and pulled into visualizations — was a true accomplishment,” says Dave.
Hear more from Dave here: