ADL Digital Lab Leverages Alteryx to Deliver Value and Digital Transformation to Customers

ADL Digital Lab is one of the largest digital laboratories in Latin America. The company was born in 2017 with the aim of promoting the digital transformation of more than 100 entities, which make up the Aval conglomerate. In 2018, CEO Ana Margarita Albir, defined that analytical capabilities should be the next step of the digital laboratory, the company's strategy was oriented to the development of advanced analytics with predictive models aligned to the business vision, and meet the demands the market imposed on its customers. This vision became reality in 2019, when Tito Pablo Neira, Chief Data Strategy Officer, launched the analytics unit. Neira formed the unit with three verticals: Core Analytics led by Lina Osorio, Visual and Digital Analytics led by Monica Carvajal, and Engineering and Platforms by Liliana Betancourt.

Furthermore, ADL defined that the best way to achieve business innovation would be the construction of a unified data platform, from which machine learning models, data intelligence, and in summary the three verticals mentioned above allow the development of the corporate data strategy. Together, the technical and business teams of ADL designed the foundations of a data platform to be built in the cloud. The data platform had to bring together several services that allow responses to the needs and challenges of analytics, and one of these services identified from the start was Alteryx.

At the center of ADL’s approach is its platform, Augusta, which helps deliver value to customers by aggregating, processing, exploiting (by different methodologies like ML, AI, BI, BA, Visual Analytics), and visualizing disparate data sources across all their clients’ organizations and industries, and finally creating and delivering interactions to final clients based on data (email marketing, programmatic advertising, personalize). Through an immersive ecosystem of different technologies such as AWS, Oracle, Power BI, and more, Augusta is a user-centric data platform primed to handle metadata, structured and unstructured data, and digital data sources to serve the needs of the client’s diverse audience. “By loading disparate data sources into the Augusta platform, ADL's clients receive a holistic enterprise-wide solution ranging from digital & visual analytics to Advanced Analytics,” says Monica Carvajal, digital & visual analytics lead at ADL. “This wide range of problem-solving capacity provides clients like large financial institutions the ability to integrate traditional business data and digital data seamlessly.”

“When we envisioned Augusta, I felt Alteryx was the clear choice to perform the analytics automation processes required for the concept to work,” Carvajal says. “I had worked with the Platform in the past, so immediately we sought our leadership team’s buy-in. We found the below reasons as to why it was pertinent to implement Alteryx:

• Augusta needed a platform which provided the ability to join with other analytical tools, as well as provide security and accessibility. Alteryx was the clear choice as the platform allowed us to load projects into AWS workspaces. We soon learned this option kept us secure and away from local machines.
• Given Alteryx’s capability to integrate with any data source and manage large sums of data and create and work with multiple APIs, it has provided Augusta the power to analyze our client’s apps both on mobile and on websites. It has allowed us to integrate disparate client data and fully automate their analytics processes, which serves as the catalyst towards their digital transformation. Whether our clients reside in manufacturing, hospitality, or transportation, Alteryx is able to help power Augusta to handle it all.
• Alteryx’s ease of use coupled with its ability to integrate with a large tech ecosystem: It has allowed Augusta to provide our analysts with their own individual workspace, while allowing us to reduce our data scientist to engineer ratio to 3:1 given the autonomy Alteryx provides.

“Thanks to our methodologies and use of the platform, we’ve been able to calculate an estimated $6 million in cost-savings and efficiencies for both ADL and our clients combined,” Carvajal says. “We also have more than 100 data visualization tools available at our disposal, with 140 automated processes that use Alteryx. All our clients can access and take advantage of their data in our Alteryx Gallery, so that provides huge impact for them.”

“Without Alteryx, Augusta functionality would be very limited and the lack of security to client data would bring chaos. It’s imperative to have a strong security process when dealing with customer data, and when everything is on a local machine, that can be a problem. It is also a must for business velocity. So, when we integrated Alteryx in Augusta that made it easier to secure everything in a workspace, and guaranteed that the data is always available, and they can use Alteryx without local computer limitations, so it will be always faster.”

Discussing what's next for ADL, Carvajal says there will be an emphasis on continuing to serve the needs of their customers and helping them get the most out of their data. “We want to generate new applications and provide new services for our clients, and to help them learn how to understand their data better,” Carvajal says. “We want to continue integrating Alteryx with everything and replace old processes with more efficient ones. We also want to keep evolving, so that we can move forward and continue to provide value.”