Charlotte Pipe Builds Smarter Manufacturing Operations with Alteryx One

Charlotte Pipe and Foundry knows the value of experience. At the 125-year-old, family-owned business, the most valuable knowledge often lives with the people closest to the work.

Joseph Pantone understands that better than most. Pantone’s own career is a mirror of the company’s culture: he started on the manufacturing floor before gradually moving into analytics leadership. “When we onboard a new analyst, they spend weeks at the foundry and the plastics plant, before embedding with our sales team,” said Pantone. “We really want them to understand the business.”

Now, as VP of Business Intelligence and Analytics, he’s the architect of a data strategy grounded in the belief that business domain knowledge is “the crown jewel” — and that technology like Alteryx is the force multiplier that enables knowledge to scale.

Disconnected data and undocumented processes

Charlotte Pipe’s long-tenured workforce is one of its greatest strengths. Many associates carried decades of practical knowledge about production, pricing, customer needs, and operational decision-making. That experience is powerful, but Pantone said it also created risk. “Early in the process, we found that documentation wasn’t always available when working through certain issues.” said Pantone.

At the same time, Charlotte Pipe was navigating a broader modernization push. Recent acquisitions created new integration demands, while back-end systems needed to keep pace with the company’s investments in manufacturing technology. The opportunity was clear: bring data, systems, and process knowledge together in a way that strengthened the business without stripping away the expertise that made it successful.

Turning domain expertise into automated workflows

Charlotte Pipe initially brought in Alteryx for traditional ETL work, including customer point-of-sales data transformation. But the bigger opportunity emerged when the BI and Analytics team began using Alteryx to capture how work was happening across the business.

The approach was hands-on. When a department had a pain point, Pantone’s team sat with the business users, watched the process, and then rebuilt the workflow in Alteryx. “The idea behind our approach is to partner with the departments and allow them to be self-service,” said Pantone. “We manage the workflows to a certain extent, but they are the ones that own it.”

That helped Charlotte Pipe build a platform for operational analytics — supporting pricing, rebates, logistics, scrap reduction, production improvement, customer analytics, and more.

Improving the ROI of manufacturing intelligence

The impact of Alteryx at Charlotte Pipe showed up in two areas: the time saved on manual processes that used to consume weeks, and the quality of decisions made by people who now have data they didn’t have before.

The monthly reconciliation process is a standout example. The team previously spent hours reconciling discrepancies across 100,000 monthly transaction records, manually pulling data, matching records in Excel, and accounting for transactions that could change mid-month. “We partnered with that team and watched the process, documented it, and then recreated the process in Alteryx,” said Pantone. “Now they use it every day. We cut their workflow from 40 hours a month to about 45 minutes.”

On the manufacturing floor, machine telemetry data is processed and fed back to the foundry in near real time, enabling faster operational decisions, scrap reduction, and improved production performance.

For Pantone, the value goes beyond individual workflows. With Alteryx, Charlotte Pipe is building a more proactive operating model, where teams can spot opportunities sooner, respond faster, and turn operational data into intelligence. “We are getting more proactive and less reactive to opportunities that are presented to us,” Pantone said.

What’s next: building on AI and agentic analytics

Charlotte Pipe is looking for ways to combine Alteryx cloud compute, Databricks, and AI capabilities to accelerate workflows and generate more actionable insights. “We have a lot of workflows that will be able to benefit from the marrying of both Databricks and Alteryx One.”

That includes creating agentic advisors that help employees make more informed decisions across the business. One future use case is an agentic product manager: an AI agent that analyzes sales data, identifies buying patterns through market basket analysis, and surfaces product opportunities to regional sales managers. The agent would act as an advisor, putting the right recommendations in front of the right person at the right moment.

Charlotte Pipe is also exploring synthetic Net Promoter Scores. Using field notes and customer data, the team runs an AI model to generate NPS-equivalent scores on a weekly basis — measuring customer sentiment on specific topics without requiring formal surveys. The goal is early signal detection: catching issues before they become problems.

That next chapter at Charlotte Pipe builds on the same foundation that made the company’s Alteryx journey successful from the start: business expertise first, technology as the multiplier.