Success story

How C&S Wholesale Grocers maximized ROI with an analytics center of excellence

by Julianne Hall

Background

C&S Wholesale Grocers, a distributor of food and grocery products, regularly created reports to understand key business metrics. These reports helped their team manage inventory and track customer and distributor satisfaction, but the processes to gather and present data were time-consuming and required manual steps, legacy SQL, and outdated Excel macros.

Challenge

C&S was looking for creative ways to manage costs and reduce the amount of time it took employees to complete business reporting. They decided to implement Alteryx, a tool that is designed to make advanced analytics accessible to any data professional.

After purchasing Alteryx licenses, the company wanted to ensure that the new software would be utilized by employees in the most efficient way. They brought in a project team, consisting of leaders from the IS Team; Colleen Michalek, Sreenivas Tenali, and Maria Wilson, to manage a full-scale implementation plan and to create a center of excellence so that they could make the most out of their investment.

Solution

After analyzing the existing business processes, the project team automated 36 workflows using Alteryx to replace manual processes and save employee time.

In addition to the workflows that were built out as part of this solution, the team also established a center of excellence to ensure the long-term adoption and success of the Alteryx platform. This CoE solution provided them with the tools they needed to maintain and grow their automation practices.

The CoE was tailored to the organization, with features to account for the organization's size, structure, and management practices. The customized solution included:

• Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) to provide guidance on best practices for using Alteryx

• Roles and responsibilities to fit their organization’s existing team structures and size

• Change management guidelines to help bolster adoption of the technology

Results

After implementing automated workflows and the analytics center of excellence, the organization has seen drastic improvements, including:

• 141 hours of employee time saved each week

• 7,300 hours of employee time saved each year

• Managed costs

Additionally, the standards adopted by the organization as part of the CoE provide the framework to build out future automations to keep their operational processes efficient. The center of excellence defined clear roles and responsibilities so that employees always know how to access information, and who to turn to when questions arise.