Customer Story
Nuclear Energy Key Stats
Industry: Engineering
Department: Business Intelligence
Region: North America
3X
ROI earned in 1 year
$250K
earned in customer data services
$150K
in cost savings
1YEAR
of time saved on manual work
Enabling speed and agility to get work done faster
“The goal in the nuclear energy industry is to keep things running smoothly and efficiently,” says the vice president of sales and marketing at a leading nuclear energy solutions provider in the United States. “Most organizations within our industry don’t have a solution dedicated to analytics to help accomplish these tasks, and most power plants don’t have exposure to this kind of work.”
“In the beginning, we had no way of taking our solutions and matching them up with the specific needs of our customers,” says a senior analyst. “Data in this industry is so fragmented that all the sources of information come in scattered and hard to work with, and the scope of the issue can be tough to communicate to executives. We were using large disparate datasets in Excel that included information on specific machinery parts, instrumentation and guidance controls, and reverse engineering products. We would try and match up our solutions by needs of customers, but the datasets were too big and limiting, and there was no traceability to find answers to our own questions within Excel. There was pressure coming down from the top and we weren’t getting any work done.”
“My ideal solution was a technology that could combine spreadsheets and database information since that’s the world we were living in, and something that was fast,” the analyst says. “We also needed to be able to learn from the things we were doing within the solution and understand what the impact meant for final results.”
For the leadership team, it was about finding a solution that moves fast and adapts even faster. “We needed to be able to attack analytical problems with more speed and agility, and be able to iterate them so that we could keep momentum with our customers going.”
Implementing a robust solution for automation and power
When researching solutions, the analyst stumbled upon Alteryx through a Google search for medium-sized data-crunching software. “I started using the Designer Platform a little over a year ago, and I was just so impressed with the level of support you get from customer service, and how helpful the tutorial videos were,” the analyst says. “Within a few weeks of using the Platform, I was pretty efficient in it.”
The main goal was to be able to automate disparate sources of customer and solutions data to make her day-to-day tasks easier. “Before Alteryx I was a full-time data combiner, and now I do all of my work almost exclusively in Alteryx. We now automate customer reports that match up our solutions and data with specific needs of customers in just a couple of clicks.”
“We appreciate the power of autonomy,” says the vice president. “We provided a demo of a customer-facing report workflow that we built out for our leadership team, and right away everyone could see the power of the tool. Since then, it’s been less communicating the findings in the Platform to the leadership team, and them more coming down to us asking questions like, ‘Can we solve X with this? And what about Y?’ The answer to those questions is almost always yes.”
“I don’t think you could estimate how many headaches we’ve saved. It’s probably close to a year of work that’s been saved.”
3 reasons Alteryx WAS CHOSEN:
01
Speed, agility, and no need for code
02
Ability to combine spreadsheets and databases
03
Access to shareable insights
Gaining the confidence to solve customer needs with data
“There’s been a revolution in our company,” the vice president says. “The Platform has been an enablement technology for us, and it has given our customers confidence in our ability to solve their pressing issues with data. We have the right technology now to do the job, we understand their data, and because of the visual structure of Alteryx, we are not only able to answer their question, but solve their needs.”
“I’m very confident that we earned upwards of $250,000 on data services alone for customers we would not have received without Alteryx, and we easily saved $150,000 in costs, giving us an ROI of 3x in just one year,” the vice president says. Even better? The bussiness’s customers see exponential ROI as a result of implementing analytic insights into their workflows. “Through this newfound data-driven behavior, it’s enabled us to save our customers millions of dollars on their own projects,” he says.
Quantitative benefits like ROI make a strong case for Alteryx at the executive level, but qualitative benefits bring out the enthusiasm throughout the company. The analyst explains how moving from manual spreadsheets to automated self-service has transformed the way they work: “The way we access data has changed. Our systems were hard and dense to work in, and there was no transparency or answers as to why data didn’t line up. Alteryx has changed the way we answer questions and given us faith in our data integrity,” she says.
The business has democratized data outside of the analytics function as well: “We’ve made our data self-service so people can do their own work in the data, which created alignment between our customers and our outside sales force. It also has changed the level of visibility our leadership team has into insights, giving them easy access into the work we are doing,” the analyst says.
Besides great ROI, the business discovered these qualitative benefits of Alteryx:
- Data transparency
- Data integrity
- Self-service
- Visibility to leadership
Continuing to leverage analytics to deliver customer value
When it comes to pondering what’s next for their organization within the platform, the business has new ideas in mind. “We are looking at acquiring some companies down the line, and we’re looking at using Alteryx tools to align finances and integration,” the analyst says.
Additionally, she believes that Alteryx has enabled the company the ability to give their customers a sense of guidance and direction. “The platform has enabled us to be an advisor to tell nuclear power plants what direction to go in, and in a way that is transparent and shareable. We are going to use that to our advantage.”
For those of you who are looking to change the way you approach data in your organization, the analyst offers insightful advice: “Start with the end in mind, use the customer resources in Community to understand what the tool can do, and map out what that looks like. I can’t think of a company that you couldn’t apply Alteryx in because of its flexibility and versatility.”
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