Alteryx Designer Desktop

Energy companies operate many turbines, transformers, meters, pipelines, breakers, and substations, but often experience unplanned equipment failures that can lead to power outages and safety risks, resulting in expensive emergency repairs, unstable grids, and revenue loss for the organization. Alteryx  workflows were utilized to merge sensor data, SCADA data, and maintenance logs and help clean and align the time-based data to build predictive models as a solution for predictive maintenance analytics, incorporating IoT sensor data, SCADA logs, weather information, and asset history to predict failures before they happen.

Before Alteryx  was implemented, the maintenance process was mostly manual and required many different tools, wasting a lot of time cleaning the data rather than analyzing it. SCADA logs arrived in messy CSV files, sensor data came in Excel dumps, maintenance history resided in SQL tables, and weather data came from APIs. These inputs had to be manually switched with heavy coding in Python, taking several hours or even a couple of days for each asset. Alteryx changed this by enabling the construction of a fully automated workflow that pulled all the data sources together, allowing data cleansing, type conversions, and transformations to happen in minutes with drag and drop functionality. This drastically reduced the time spent on data preparation and allowed the team to focus more on the modeling part and insights.

Alteryx achieved true end-to-end automation where data ingestion, cleaning, modeling, and reporting all ran automatically on the server scheduler, saving hundreds of business analyst hours.

Alteryx has greatly impacted the organization positively. A reduction of almost fifty to seventy percent in time spent on repetitive data preparation has been observed. Processes that took six to eight hours now take just twenty to thirty minutes, and workflows can run automatically without human intervention. Faster and more accurate decisions can be made, with dashboards updating daily or even hourly instead of weekly. This leads to more up-to-date, error-free decision-making. Improvements in predictive and advanced analytics have been observed, enabling analysts to build models more accurately and quickly, with monthly regulatory reports produced ninety percent quicker than before.

Alteryx offers many capabilities, with the drag and drop feature being particularly valuable. This simple on-the-screen functionality requires no coding and allows business users to build complex workflows without needing technical resources. This lowers the barrier to entry for analytics, making it accessible for any analyst.

The drag and drop feature empowers team members who previously needed strong SQL, Python, R, or Excel macros experience to feel confident and experiment. Previously, data was gathered and cleaned while writing scripts and testing queries, going back and forth between developers, analysts, and DBAs. Now, workflows are built, tested, and iterated all in one visual environment, instantly seeing the result of each step. Dependency on IT for SQL writing or pipeline redesign has been eliminated, and knowledge transfer is easier since every workflow step is visible. This builds trust with downstream users and helps onboard new team members faster, eliminating earlier long debugging processes.

While Alteryx has introduced their Designer Cloud, many users feel that its cloud features lag behind the desktop designer experience. Deployment has limited flexibility, and scaling workflows in cloud environments like AWS  or Google Cloud  Platform is not seamless. Merging workflows can be difficult, and collaboration across teams can be cumbersome without Alteryx Server. A unified lineage explorer combined with impact analysis and a metadata catalog would enhance Alteryx as a tool for data governance and analytics.

Work in data quality has been conducted for over six years.

Alteryx is a stable tool, and in this experience, many workflows, even large ones, run reliably over weeks or monthly periods, making it robust and enterprise-ready.

Alteryx is scalable and can handle increasing data volumes and users well.

The customer support from Alteryx is decent. User feedback and community discussions indicate responsive support for standard issues, and the existence of forums allows users to find situational workarounds from peers.

A return on investment has been seen with Alteryx. Weekly, each analyst saves about five to ten hours in data preparation, with reports that used to take four to five days now processed in just one day. A sixty to seventy percent time reduction has been experienced, leading to lower labor costs and fewer manual processing hours. Emergency maintenance and outages on a large scale have been avoided, representing a significant ROI for any energy company.

Understanding the use case is important rather than choosing a tool based on its popularity. High-value use cases like data blending, automation of reporting, and predictive analysis should be identified. Investing in training is crucial to understanding Alteryx's full potential and reducing time to value. Additionally, proper architecture planning by data architects is essential, considering data volume, user needs, automation requirements, and data governance standards. The overall review rating for Alteryx is eight out of ten.

Private Cloud

Amazon Web Services  (AWS)

What do you like best about the product?

Alteryx is really easy to use and son not require much technical knowledge so if people having less technical knowledge, they can also use Alteryx. It has the great feature of drag and drop interface which makes it simple to build workflows, anyone from beginner to experienced data pros handle complex data tasks without getting too deep into coding. It has the another plus is that it is letting you the processes automated which is saving time and reducing error, The support from it's community is also good.

What do you dislike about the product?

As far as my experience with it, no issues i have faced till now so good to go.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Alteryx is helping the big problem related to data work. There is the time and Complexity involved in cleaning, preparing and blending data for analysis. There is no need of writing long SQL queries, i can simply drag and drop tools to do the same stuff in visual workflow and it is helping in saving from manual efforts and work.

What do you like best about the product?

Offers drag and drop workflow interface allowing users to build complex data pipelines

What do you dislike about the product?

Nothing its good as of now without any loops

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Helped in data preparation, blending, and advanced analytics

What do you like best about the product?

Alteryx helps us handle data preparation needs significantly, without demanding extra coding skills or programming requirements
The program has a broader data connectivity mechanism, that helps us integrate with different cloud services
We streamline all data enhancement measures through brilliant automation
The program ensure our analytics is efficient and very diverse to make us stay informed
We provide excellent support to our communities and customers

What do you dislike about the product?

Alteryx demands high licensing costs that discourages most users
Tye program demands high processing power, calling for strong hardware and impressive systems

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Alteryx takes the whole problem of data blending and cleaning, by incorporating structured measures for smooth automation
We connect with multiple data silos, all offering comprehensive information coverage
We get empowered to des with heavy analytics and business models by Alteryx
No cases of data delays or incorrect information flow, snd this is fully amplified by the program
We consistently conduct our predictive analytics from Alteryx

What do you like best about the product?

This software is easy to use and very user-friendly. It is also capable of handling large databases efficiently.

What do you dislike about the product?

There is nothing to dislike about Alteryx; it is a good software.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

This tool is a good choice for beginners who want to learn and use ETL processes. It can manage large databases effectively and is compatible with most types of databases, including Google BigQuery.