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Tyler Nagano
Data Engineer Consultant
William Chan
CEO & Partner
March 12, 2024
By the Compass Team
Services
Data Architecture & Infrastructure
industry
Airlines
Stack
Alteryx
Workflows Governed
Departments Migrated
Alteryx Champions Trained
The Compass Analytics team started with an Alteryx Server architecture review to highlight pain points and bottlenecks in their current analytics process. A comprehensive review highlighted an opportunity to increase throughput by scaling out workloads to additional nodes. Our team also identified that there was no resource monitoring and quickly set-up the appropriate tracking. Our team also provided governance training sessions on best practices for deploying and maintaining Alteryx workflows on Server. We equipped them with documentation standards for workflow creation, adapted the most critical workflows to these standards, and supported the airline with the full documentation and migration process.
Our client is a Star Alliance airline carrying over 15 million passengers globally every year. They are also seasoned users of the Alteryx Analytics Platform and use the platform to run their airline operations. They experienced a demand surge due to the pandemic and as a result, faced significant challenges in maintaining their growing Alteryx infrastructure. Another challenge they faced was retaining essential institutional knowledge as experienced team members left the organization. While they had established systems in place, these were not sufficient to ensure continuity. Our client needed a proper governance framework to improve knowledge sharing among team members, preserve vital business logic despite staff turnover, and implement best practice architecture for Alteryx Server.
Our client, a seasoned airline company, extensively uses Alteryx for key business processes to solve problems from identifying passengers to be reprotected on disrupted flights to calculating cabin booking performance across their network.
Alteryx is deployed across various business units with centralized workflow processing on a large Alteryx Server.
While the client has substantial expertise in building workflow logic, they have faced challenges due to turnover and insufficient documentation, requiring some workflows to be completely rebuilt. They sought to overhaul their documentation process and standardize it across business units on their upgraded Alteryx Server.
They also faced issued in their Alteryx Server performance due to the volume of workflows processed daily.
Addressing these issues would facilitate better sharing of business knowledge within the team and improve their analytics and business governance, resulting in more efficient operations and enhanced data-driven decision-making.
Our client sought an effective solution to streamline the sharing of Alteryx workflow knowledge among team members. The existing process, where workflow expertise was tied to individual employees, resulted in knowledge loss and increased training costs whenever staff turnover occurred, hindering organizational progress and market competitiveness.
To address their Alteryx Server performance issues, our team conducted an architecture review which revealed significant bottleneck issues caused by large jobs. Our team recommended horizontal scaling to better distribute workloads by job type. Our team also implemented system monitoring to track CPU and RAM usage across worker nodes therby highlighing any further performance issues.
Our team identified a critical issue regarding the maintainability of workflows over time. With numerous licenses deployed and multiple workflows developed by each user, it became evident that a new approach to documentation and knowledge sharing was necessary to ensure smooth business operations. To address this, we standardized training protocols across the organization, fostering improved communication and more efficient workflows.
To help the client solve their issues with Alteryx Server governance, configuration and documentation best practices, the Compass Analytics team provided two main services: Alteryx training sessions and Alteryx Workflow documentation and migration.
During the Alteryx training sessions, the Compass team presented a comprehensive framework for Alteryx Server governance and supplied governance documents to manage internal change management processes, specifically for promoting Alteryx workflows from the development server to the production server. Additional sessions covered key components of our Alteryx workflow documentation standards, offering users documentation templates and a guide for effectively structuring major workflow elements. These sessions are foundational in cultivating a work culture focused on maintaining workflows moving forward.
For the Alteryx workflow documentation, we documented several critical business workflows following the Compass documentation standard. We reorganized workflows to provide a clearer flow of transformations and added context to key components. Before migrating all documented workflows to the Alteryx Server production environment, we conducted walkthroughs with each workflow owner to ensure adherence to documentation standards and other checks necessary for promoting workflows to production.
The Alteryx Server training and Workflow documentation initiatives have significantly enhanced the Star Alliance airline's knowledge-sharing capabilities and governance framework. By standardizing documentation practices, the airline has streamlined operations, reducing rework and ensuring the seamless execution of critical business processes.
The Compass team delivered hands-on training in documentation best practices, ensuring the team could effectively implement key components. They assisted in documenting critical workflows, establishing a foundation for the organization's documentation standard. This refined practice promotes better knowledge sharing and more sustainable business operations.
The Alteryx Server governance training set a new standard for managing workflows on the server. Comprehensive documentation provided a framework for governance and workflow promotion processes. These improvements in server infrastructure and administration enhance efficiency and robustness in workflow processes and analytics throughput.
The Compass team introduced a new documentation standard and initiated change management processes to improve workflow documentation. Through training sessions, best practices guides, and the initial documentation of workflows, they laid the groundwork for enhanced knowledge sharing and efficiency, reducing rework and optimizing business processes.
John Molson Supply Chain and
Business Technology Association
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