“It’s mind-blowing, and it’s definitely something that I’m very proud to be a part of,” said Valentina Radchanka, a data professional at T-Mobile. Five years ago, her colleague, Gary Vu-Sabido, was introduced to Alteryx. Since then, the two of them have been working to innovate and automate within the accounting team, solving the issues that eat up the team’s time and keep them late at work.
Together, Radchanka and Vu-Sabido set up automated analytic workflows in Alteryx, each with robust governance and auditability, saving hundreds of working hours while mitigating the risks of fraudulent activity and inaccurate data. “I believe my career is going to go somewhere crazy in the next chapter in my life,” Radchanka said. “You can change the trajectory of your career with Alteryx.”
She and Vu-Sabido are two examples of Analytics Champions, the bold problem-solvers and quietly ambitious optimizers who power confident business decisions. In this blog, we’ll show you exactly how these data professionals use five specific tenets to uncover and share business-guiding, career-defining insights.
Tenet #1: Create Trust in Data
Are you familiar with the meme where two or more identical Spider-Mans point at each other? The meme originated from a scene in the 1967 animated series where a villain impersonates the real Spider-Man. This meme embodies the confusion when multiple stakeholders have clashing numbers in a meeting — none of which match the dashboard, whose version control is questionable.
Source: “Now’s the time to tackle Data Ownership”
Businesses can’t make accurate decisions when they don’t have accurate data. In addition, inaccurate data can lead to significant risks and costs beyond suboptimal decisions. For example, one study sought to quantify the impact of spreadsheet errors. After examining 25 operational spreadsheets in businesses, the study found 381 errors, seven of which led to costs exceeding $10M.
Whether it’s a team making decisions or the underpinning of an AI system, inputs determine outputs, and bad data equals poor results. Analytics Champions know that to succeed in business, they must create trustworthy and reliable data.
Kraft Heinz transformed decision-making and saved 5,500 analyst hours with a single source of truth
Kraft Heinz, a Fortune 500 company and one of the world’s largest food and beverage companies, knew this challenge well. Every week, a cross-functional team with demand planners, supply planners, analysts, and business leaders met, but most of the meeting’s time was squandered with non-stop number questioning — numbers that originated from a ragtag group of spreadsheets.
Melissa Torres, Heinz’s business intelligence engineer, set out to create a single source of truth. She vetted data sources, scrutinized numbers, and asked tough questions. While the upfront work was rigorous and time-consuming, her repeatable analytics workflow report took just minutes to run. Business leaders and stakeholders could finally rely on the data for confident decision-making and forecasts.
This trusted workflow saved Kraft Heinz 5,5000 analyst hours per year. With their new report, not only could they review week-over-week historical data to evaluate past decisions, but the team even uncovered typos in the data from other parts of the organization, as that data didn’t match their new single source of truth.
Tenet #2: Automate to Accelerate
The second tenet Analytics Champions use to guide their businesses is automation. A force multiplier, automation frees up Analytic Champions’ time for more strategic work. It’s a tool used to focus on the meaningful part of data analytics: problem-solving and answer-hunting, not tedious, manual data work.
Every part of the analytics lifecycle is ripe for automation, from aggregating and preparing data to running reports and sharing insights. Powerful automation solutions can free up dozens of hours per week for analysts to dig deeper into their data and push for incremental business improvements. Just ask the Analytics Champions at DoorDash, who saved 25,000 hours.
Analytics Champions at DoorDash saved 25,000 hours with Alteryx
Tasked with managing the business’s “mecca of data,” the accounting team at DoorDash had to manage a growing and unwieldy data repository. However, with Alteryx, the team was able to build hundreds of automated analytic workflows, saving 25,000 hours annually and realizing millions in ROI.
Alex Barr, senior manager for revenue data at DoorDash, said Alteryx transformed what used to be complex and time-consuming financial processes into no-touch, end-to-end automation. “We use Alteryx for streamlining tons of different operational processes, from self-service data acquisition to conducting in-depth financial analysis, automating transactions, and ensuring our account reconciliations are automatically prepped and accurate.”
Tenet #3: Enhance with AI
Despite what all the so-called experts predicted, AI isn’t replacing data analysts, but it is forever changing the game. According to a workforce report from Microsoft, 64% of workers don’t have enough time or energy to finish their work — and those same employees are 3.5x more likely to struggle with being innovative or thinking strategically.
These limited skills — creative and analytical thinking — are the very skills that experts predict will grow most quickly in importance over the next five years. In the age of AI, critical thinking and problem-solving are differentiators. And just like automation, AI is helping Analytics Champions get back to the heart of analytics by automating mundane work and enabling more intelligent ways of working.
Take AutoML tools (like Alteryx Machine Learning) for example. They’re empowering data workers without a traditional data science background to quickly build ML models and uncover predictive and prescriptive insights. Likewise, Gen AI solutions and copilots are giving analysts the ability to dialogue with their data set, quickly build analytic processes, and even rapidly create emails, PowerPoints, and reports for stakeholders.
Kingfisher’s People Analytics Team saves 170 employee hours per month
Kingfisher, an international home improvement company based in London with nearly 2,000 retail stores, knew that to succeed in the current talent market, they needed to use data to attract and retain talent and improve employee satisfaction. So, they formed the People Analytics Team, led by Analytics Champion Iain Reid.
The team’s task was daunting: consolidate a large, complex, disparate data set of more than 80,000 global employees and create a governed, readily accessible global HR data set. With Alteryx Auto Insights, Reid and his team created a predictive model that spotted signs of employee turnover and explained why employees were likely to leave, helping the HR team take proactive action. Not only did the People Analytics Team help HR upskill into data-driven domain experts, but their use of AI saved 170 FTE hours per month while delivering considerable cost savings.
Tenet #4: Optimize Your Data Stack
Organizations intuitively know they need data to succeed, but many still rely on legacy data infrastructures with disparate systems and time-consuming processes. However, when organizations attempt to modernize their existing data stack, they make the mistake of choosing overly complex architectures and tools that require specialized skill sets. Instead, Analytics Champions architect data stacks that leverage easy-to-use solutions, making data more readily available and accessible to multiple stakeholders and leaders.
Close teamwork between the data team, IT, and business users is required to expand access to data safely and securely, but when it’s pulled off, the results are phenomenal. Case in point? The Analytics Champions at BODi.
BODi saves 33% in data infrastructure costs while seeing a 25% increase in subscribers
More than two million subscribers use BODi’s online platform, which offers on-demand workouts, nutritional programs and supplements, and mindset classes. That’s two million users generating constant customer and order data.
“Our inability to connect data sources at scale increasingly became an issue — especially with millions of subscribers and orders per year,” said Armen Rostamian, vice president of marketing intelligence & analytics. Technical constraints like these added layers of complexity to their data processes and delayed insights by up to 48 hours.
But that all turned around when BODi adopted a modern data stack. By combining Snowflake’s powerful infrastructure with Alteryx’s easy-to-use analytics solution, BODi made its data stack more accessible from start to finish. Teams across the business could access the data they needed, transform it with Alteryx, and share insights at scale — all in a secure and governed way.
Tenet #5: Empower the Business
Analytics and IT teams only have so much time and bandwidth, so they must prioritize which business users and use cases to support. However, the data pros who are experts in analytics and machine learning may not be as well versed in monthly cash-flow forecasting or inventory planning as the business users they’re supporting.
In other words, in organizations where the data team is the de facto source of insights, only some business teams are getting the necessary support, or the insights they receive are suboptimal for the business use case.
Although Analytics Champions are data pros, they don’t keep their ability to find insights to themselves. They know a rising tide lifts all the boats, so they push for a wholesale adoption of self-service analytics, empowering business users to make data-driven decisions at scale. In some instances, like with Roquette, this can result in 100,000% process improvements.
Roquette empowers data at scale for 1000x efficiency improvement
Pierre-Louis Bescond, Analytics Champion and head of data science at Roquette, a global leader in plant-based ingredients, recognized that in a data-heavy industry, transformation is impossible without the ability to process and unlock insights from large data sets rapidly.
“Any team which is forced to spend huge amounts of time manually processing data has the potential to automate using Alteryx,” Bescond said. “The success of the platform in the Roquette Operations department has created a kind of snowball effect, with more and more people reaching out from teams such as Research & Development, Quality & Controlling, and Human Resources.”
The efficiency gains at Roquette have been dramatic, with one team achieving a 1,000x improvement on a process that involved the manual export of 3,000 Excel databases. Pierre-Louis fully automated the process within Alteryx. What previously took 100 hours of clicking through spreadsheets is now accomplished in just three minutes.
Make a difference with your data
While the five tenets of Analytics Champions represent specific, effective actions and strategies, they don’t paint the whole picture of Analytics Champions. Analytics Champions aren’t champions because they use the five tenets (although that helps). Analytics Champions are champions because they use the five tenets to fulfill their innate desire to problem solve, answer tough questions, and uplift others. It’s who they are. It’s why they’re reshaping modern business and catapulting their careers one business question at a time.
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