ANALYTICS | CASE STUDY

Automate & Streamline Processes for More Accurate Forecasting

COMPANY OVERVIEW

Employing nearly 5,600 people worldwide, the client is a U.S. based workforce management software and services company headquartered in Massachusetts. The client is a leading provider of workforce management and human capital management cloud solutions, offering the industry’s most powerful suite of tools and services to manage and engage an entire workforce from pre-hire to retire.

BUSINESS NEED

With a planned move to a SaaS model, the client had a need to measure the bottom line impact of migrating current customers to the cloud and providing prospective customers with the appropriate products and services to meet their unique needs. The calculations used in this process were variable by platform, product, and several other factors, and when done in Excel were time consuming and error prone due to a need to apply business rules to many scenarios.

SOLUTION

With the help of Alteryx to automate and bring flexibility to the revenue forecasting process, Ironside was able to optimize the calculations and produce a series of datasets to power visual insight, with a self-documented, visually represented workflow that eases supportability.

Discovery & Analysis

Worked collaboratively with the team responsible for maintaining the existing solution in Excel as well as the stakeholders who would leverage the output of the forecasts to make decisions to understand the business logic and business impact of the new workflow
Assessed the most effective data integration and transformation processes to use in the workflow design and created a high level design that was broken into 2 main modules

Develop First Iteration

Broke the development tasks into 2 iterations based on the 2 main modules in the workflow
Delivered value faster and incorporated feedback from the development and initial testing of the first module into the 2nd iteration

Develop Second Iteration

Focused on applying efficiency gains from lessons learned in the 1st iteration and on organizing and documenting the workflow for ease of future maintenance

Collaborative Testing

Facilitateed collaborative testing by holding several testing workshops focused on comparing the outputs of the original Excel solution and the new automated workflow
Incorporated the output of the Alteryx model into a data visualization platform
Quickly aggregated and drilled into any area of discrepancy to investigate differences and determine if there were any issues with the workflow’s business logic

KEYS TO SUCCESS

By automating their business forecasting process, the client now has the ability to:

Automate and streamline Excel-based processes to more quickly and accurately forecast revenue associated with a migration of customers to cloud-based applications
Create scalability and flexibility in the model workflow with automated data transformations that simplify calculations and allow for what-if analysis

Facilitate ease-of-use and business enablement through the use of self-documenting features to make the workflow easy to understand, interpret, and maintain
Support for troubleshooting and maintenance through the automatic generation of error and trace files

About Alteryx

Alteryx is an end-to-end platform that unifies the analytic experience, enabling organizations to break data barriers and solve business problems faster. It provides the analytic flexibility that business analysts, data scientists, and IT need to discover, prep, analyze, and operationalize analytic models through a collaborative and governed platform.

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