CenturyLink

CenturyLink

The Situation

As the third largest national landline carrier behind Verizon and AT&T following its latest industry acquisitions, CenturyLink's coverage area in square miles quadrupled and its population base increased six and a half times. Strategic planning processes that once took hours to deliver actionable insights now were taking days to complete. Those processes that had taken days to produce results, were now taking weeks and months.

The Solution

A Director of Strategy and Network Engineering installed his first copy of Alteryx at 7:30 am one morning. By 8:00 am, he was running his first process in Alteryx. The analysis included 58 wireless carrier coverage areas, and 3 million block boundaries within a spectrum that CenturyLink had recently purchased from the FCC. The Director needed to find the spatial match between these geographies, and then pull the results out in a format that could be rendered with precision as operational field maps.

The Results

Using the intuitive visual workflow environment of the Alteryx desktop environment, the Director was able to "learn the system," and build his

I got Alteryx, read some of the documentation, wrote a routine, and within minutes I had the same answer that it took me 14 days to get.

- Mark Ulrich, Senior Strategic Planner at CenturyLink

entire process within Alteryx, in ~30 minutes. The entire process ran in 19 minutes in Alteryx versus the 10 days that the same process took to run in MapInfo/MapBasic-not to mention the up-front programming time that was needed to build the MapBasic routines.

Alteryx has improved CenturyLink's strategic planning deliverables in these areas:

  • More Timely Analyses: superior speed and processing algorithms enable quick results for Senior Management
  • Business Analytics: data assets integrated into the Alteryx platform proved their value with automation and out-of-the-box reporting
  • Flexibility with Diverse Data Assets: spatial and relational database tools enabled the seamless and rapid integration of asset, network services and customer records following major industry acquisitions