Implementing systems, absorbing acquisitions, and peeling off divestitures is brutal!
Alteryx can help!
Accessing, exporting, manipulating, and pushing data from one system’s format to a totally different system’s format is incredibly difficult. Layer in bad data, the desire to streamline your processes, and unique functionality available in the new system, and you have an epic project on your hands.
Alteryx is the perfect tool to streamline the process. It can access data from nearly any system/format, allow you to see and manipulate your data as needed, and allow you to load your data directly into nearly any “new” platform.
At Capitalize, we can reduce a system implementation project timeline by 25-50%.
Migration and Implementation Challenges
Transitioning to a new ERP/CRM/HCM platform is more challenging as systems and organizations become more complex. Every increase in functionality comes with more data – and more types of data – to reconcile. Add mergers and acquisitions into the mix, and the complexity is compounded. Not only does this mean transforming and reconciling data from myriad sources and structures, organizations also face tight timelines and stringent audit requirements.
Assembling the right team, with the right mix of technical and business resources, is key. Technical staff, intimately familiar with the legacy systems, must be involved in programmatic migration tasks. The involvement of business stakeholders is critical as well. Your subject matter experts are the people who use the systems every day. They know where the data is, how it’s used, and where the gaps are. Engaging these experts as stakeholders in a migration helps to bolster the project’s success. To ensure that the data available to your business is of the highest quality possible, this team must work together throughout the project.
Alteryx: A Powerful Tool
We understand these complexities, and we help our clients manage these transitions smoothly. One of the key components to our success is a powerful tool in our arsenal: Alteryx. Alteryx connects to, cleanses, and harmonizes data from a wide variety of sources – cloud applications, data warehouses, spreadsheets, and more.
Alteryx has the power and capacity to deal with the most complex migrations, handling much larger volumes of data than some other systems. For you, this means less risk, and significant time savings at every stage in the migration.
With Alteryx, simply build an export, transform, load, and test processes once, and then run it again anytime. The “build once, run anytime” capabilities in Alteryx make the dozens or hundreds of tests and reloads much faster than traditional Excel-based processes.
Data Cleaning
The analysis you perform, and the insights you gain, are only as good as the data you are using. Faulty data in leads to faulty analysis out. If you’re considering a systems migration or implementation, it’s never too soon to begin the process of data cleaning. This can start prior to the implementation project and is best handled on the legacy system. Alteryx has integrated data cleaning tools that support effective migrations, but they can also be used ahead of time. During the migration itself, Alteryx has a powerful capability to apply rules to the data, extracting and flagging data that doesn’t meet those rules, automating many of the data cleanup processes that slow and complicate an implementation.
Data Transformation
In any system migration, the central challenge of data transformation is that of a “square peg and round hole.” Every system houses and treats data differently, and a migration often means modifying data within the legacy systems. Alteryx provides the project team with an unmatched ability to ensure that data is mapped accurately from the legacy system to the new one.
Reconciliation
When bringing two systems together or moving from a legacy system to a new one, reconciliation is key. The project team needs the ability to compare data from one system to the other. Alteryx automates this step, applying repeatable rules and generating the exception reports your team needs.
Alteryx has an unparalleled ability to incorporate transactional data into the migration. Once migrated, legacy data is treated by the new system as if the transactions were its own, as if everything had been done on the new platform. Imagine an organ transplant, where the body can’t distinguish the donated organ from its own. This seamless history allows you to more easily compare and reconcile this transactional data and makes the data available for Prior Period Adjustments (PPAs) within the new platform.
Through the migration project, we also bring the expertise and specialized experience of our own analytics team to our client projects, exploring other insights and data model improvements that can be implemented using Alteryx. Our goal is to help our clients make the right design decisions created specifically for the company, resulting in the data-driven insights they need.
Alteryx is one of the only tools we’ve found that empowers business users and analysts as well as the IT teams. Typical Excel processes that are used for data manipulation, cleansing, and reformatting for loading are very manual and error-prone. That functionality is difficult to support and validate. With Alteryx, data flows are built in a visual way that is easy to understand, troubleshoot, and maintain. Once the process is built, it can be run anytime. Some processes that can take upwards of eight hours in Excel take only a few minutes in Alteryx. Because there are no manual steps, the chance of error is virtually zero.
Client Story – System Migration
One of our client projects illustrates this perfectly. Our client was pulling data out of their old system, cleaning and preparing it in Excel, loading it into the new system, then looking for errors. They found errors every time, and of course, they had to do it all over again. This process took a team of five people two days for every reload.
Capitalize was brought in to expedite the migration. We rebuilt the process in Alteryx. It ran in less than an hour, and it could be run anytime. They could then test, fix the original system, and rerun the export and import, all in a fraction of the time.
Client Story – Acquisition
Alteryx is particularly useful when time is limited. In one previous project, one of our clients had acquired another company. They were required to move all their data off the legacy system in less than three months. This was impossible to do using Excel, and their IT team – already under pressure with other tasks – couldn’t dedicate the resources that would have been required. Alteryx allowed us to pull, analyze, expose data errors, fix, and load the data into the new system in approximately one month. That gave our client ample time to dig into the data and resolve any issues with the seller long before the three-month deadline.
All of this adds up to less risk, greater speed and efficiency, and higher quality insights for you and your business. Using Alteryx, we avoid the risk of system crashes; processes are repeatable, documented, and transparent for ease of reporting. And with the powerful automation capabilities Alteryx brings to these projects, we’re generally able to cut the length of any migration in half or better. With complex migrations and implementations potentially taking up to a year, that’s a significant savings in staff hours and project costs.
Summary
In short, Alteryx helps us help our clients. If you’re considering a systems migration or integration, no matter the scope or complexity, Capitalize and Alteryx can streamline the process. Alteryx is a powerful tool that we can use to shorten your project timelines and reduce your risk. System migrations and M&A integrations don’t have to be a nightmare. Let us help!