[The first in a series of three “Aleryx Insights” blog posts from Kelsey Kincaid, senior manager of data science at Evolytics]

Choosing the right analytics technology for your stack is often a complex challenge, primarily because there are so many capable solutions in the marketplace. Deciding which tools best support your analysts while meeting or exceeding the expectations of business leaders can feel overwhelming—but that doesn’t need to be the case. There are many robust options available—each with its own set of valuable features—but one platform we’ve had great success with at Evolytics offers a dynamic suite of features right out-of-the-box. Let’s take a look at why analysts and business leaders alike are taking note and elevating their organizations’ performance by investing in Alteryx.   

Meet Alteryx

Alteryx introduces a new approach to data analysis that’s highly intuitive and easy-to-learn for analysts and leaders. It solves a broad spectrum of problems—from automating manual operational tasks to creating robust data engineering pipelines to providing real-time self-service analysis for leadership. Better yet, Alteryx puts all this functionality directly in the hands of front-line analysts, empowering them to move faster and with greater independence without relying on constant support from IT or data engineering teams. So, what exactly is Alteryx?

In short, Alteryx is an intuitive and dynamic, yet simple-to-use, data analysis platform. It includes drag-and-drop building blocks used to conduct data exploration, perform data analysis and construct automated data pipelines—without requiring knowledge of any specific coding language. Alteryx won’t perplex most business analysts with the lines and lines of code they’re accustomed to seeing with other applications instead, presenting workflows in easily interpretable views like this:

Reasons Our Analysts Appreciate Alteryx

• Beginner-Friendly: Analysts accustomed to tools like Excel may struggle to pick up coding languages such as Python, but Alteryx’s drag-and-drop tools smooth the learning curve.
• Easy to Troubleshoot: With Alteryx, you can view and manipulate your data in the middle of the process to understand exactly what is happening before and after each step in the workflow. This helps analysts to identify the root cause of nearly any issue they encounter.
• Multiple System Connectivity: Alteryx integrates with a variety of data sources, from spreadsheets to APIs to SQL databases to Amazon s3. This provides easy analysis of data across multiple systems where this can be difficult in other tools.
• Advanced Analysis Capabilities: Alteryx includes tools for spatial, predictive, time series, and optimization analysis. Analysts often struggle to elevate their analytical practice without a deep knowledge of Python or R, but Alteryx takes this capability and makes it readily available. 

How can Alteryx benefit business leaders?

• Transparency: Since Alteryx is a visual tool, it’s easy to open up and understand what’s going on behind the scenes without deep technical knowledge.
• Transferability: Technical staff turnover costs companies more than 100% of that employee’s salary. Many companies face significant challenges after losing highly technical team members who built and maintained processes that other members are not capable of taking over. While Alteryx is not a magical solution for succession planning, its visual and intuitive nature lessens the impact of losing uniquely skilled analysts. Additionally, it’s easier to follow other colleagues’ thought processes in Alteryx than in other tools, which provides a smoother transition between users working on similar projects.
• Efficiency: Alteryx really adds value when it comes to automating manual, repetitive tasks. If your team is bogged down with manual work in Excel, creating weekly reports, or sending scheduled emails to a large group, Alteryx will save them significant time. This also frees up analysts to spend more time on tasks that provide greater value to your organization and clients.

This is a brief overview that only highlights some of the capabilities and benefits provided by Alteryx. Analysts and business leaders who invest in this powerful tool quickly understand its unique breadth of robust features not found in other platforms.

Learn More About Alteryx

Future posts in this series will include information about how to build a successful Alteryx practice, and a deeper look at its capabilities.

In the meantime, contact Evolytics to learn more about Alteryx and let us help you leverage its power—to rack up big wins right out of the gate!