Ingersoll Rand Automates Multimillion-Dollar Inventory-Control With Alteryx

Specializing in the manufacturing of industrial tools, such as compressor systems, power tools, lifting, material handling, and more, Ingersoll Rand has made its mark across the globe. “We are a $6.5 billion-dollar industrial company supporting numerous industries like construction, electronics, food and beverage, manufacturing, automotive, healthcare, oil & gas, power generation, and aerospace, just to name a few,” says Jamie Beason, analytics and productivity leader with Ingersoll Rand. “We’re pretty much everywhere, but behind the scenes!”

Leading a team of four analysts that support distribution center operations, no two days at work are the same for Beason. “The culture around data and analytics is still changing here,” Beason says. “It can feel very old fashioned at times since metrics are often reported on whiteboards!”

“My team began as an Inventory Management team,” Beason says. “We were not only responsible for determining what to stock and how and when to replenish, but we also owned ensuring that all items were set up in the system correctly. If you’ve never worked in Materials Management, let me just say there’s a lot that can go wrong inside an ERP system … and finding those gaps before they cause supply chain disruptions is paramount. Our distribution center is Ingersoll Rand’s largest in North America and utilizes roughly $60 million dollars of inventory to support four different business units.

“We were often at the mercy of the demand plan’s accuracy and minimum purchase requirements, neither of which were controlled by my group. The number one recurring question to cross our desks was, ‘Why are we over- or under-stocked on item XYZ.’ As such, we found ourselves repeating the same manual steps over and over again to answer a repeating question. As excel junkies stuck in a labor-intensive loop, we knew there had to be a better way.

When Beason heard about Alteryx Analytic Process Automation™ at an internal analytics summit she attended within Ingersoll Rand in 2018, she knew it was the solution they needed to solve their issues. “What stood out to me the most was the intuitive nature of how workflows were being created and that you didn’t need to be able to code to become a citizen data scientist. My background is in supply chain, so this democratization of data analytics was revolutionary for me.

“We used Alteryx to automate the manual process of problem-solving root causes of over/under ordering. The drag-and-drop functionality made it easy to figure out what we were doing, and because of the personalities on my team, we found learning Alteryx to be a rewarding adventure. We use the acronym FAIL to describe our view of failure: First Attempt In Learning. To us, this meant that having a lot of safe micro-failures wasn’t a bad thing. … It was a healthy thing! This gave us the space to learn the ropes. It also helped that the learning curve was pretty gentle given how user-friendly the Platform is.

“Now, we can stratify all inventory in the building at the item level in under three minutes to create a Pareto of drivers causing excess inventory. We’ve since used this view not only to answer countless questions and save time, but also to illustrate to leaders the key drivers behind our inventory levels. It was a gamechanger.”

Jamie Beason
Analytics and Productivity Leader
Ingersoll Rand