A prominent education technology company aimed to refine its Alteryx workflow by enhancing optimisation, troubleshooting, and functionality to guarantee seamless, reliable, and automated operations. Discover how The Information Lab reduced the firm's workflow run time from 15 minutes to 90 seconds through streamlining enrolment automation, dashboard optimisation, and overall enablement.

The Challenge

Prior to collaborating with The Information Lab, the company faced several challenges. They aimed to optimise their enrolment workflow to construct multiple dashboards and utilise data from the revenue and enrollment teams. However, limited resources and bandwidth posed significant barriers. Given the organisation’s reliance on this workflow’s accuracy, reliability, and repeatability, it was crucial for the process to operate seamlessly without manual interventions. The organisation also sought to up-skill its team, whose analysts were relatively inexperienced with Tableau and Alteryx, having predominantly relied on Excel before. Some of the issues the members faced were encountering difficulties in creating tables and there were inconsistencies with fields not matching although they had identical names.

Additionally, the workflow's run time was excessively long, averaging around 15 minutes, which impeded data updates and hindered overall efficiency. A major concern was data mismatches between Excel workbook values and hyper file values, as the original workflow had two output points. This resulted in discrepancies due to value mismatches and differing schemas, which led to the team struggling to determine which information was more accurate. To address this, it is essential to establish a single source of truth to ensure consistency and reliability across all data outputs, thereby resolving discrepancies and improving the workflow's efficiency.

Our Solution

To start, The Information Lab team implemented a versatile approach to address these challenges. Our team began by optimising the enrolment workflow and ensuring consistency between Excel workbooks and hyperfiles. Despite initial challenges with slow run times, we addressed these issues by eliminating redundant tools in the dashboard to help speed up the run time. Our team also consolidated seven Excel files into a single file for the dashboard.

Enablement sessions were also conducted to help educate team members and improve their proficiency in Tableau and Alteryx. Each week, two-hour-long sessions were held, utilising the organisation’s data to create practical examples and exercises. Our team also developed a table structure to display revenue and key metrics across various dashboard charts. Additionally, office hours and individual sessions were provided to further assist members in developing new dashboards and workflows.

The Impact

The average workflow run time was reduced from 15 minutes to 90 seconds. The training sessions significantly improved the analysts' skills in Tableau, enabling them to independently showcase their knowledge on dashboards, create table filters and containers, and troubleshoot. The two analysts on the team were now capable of independently creating and presenting dashboards to their managers as well. The recorded enablement sessions also minimised the need for frequent inquiries about how to use dashboards. These improvements saved the client considerable time, as previously only one team member was proficient in both Tableau and Alteryx, managing numerous ad-hoc requests daily.

The optimisations resulted in substantial weekly time savings for the client, approximately six and a half hours each week. Overall, these enhancements translated into substantial time savings for the client, allowing for more focused efforts on strategic initiatives and fostering a more agile and self-sufficient team.