Customer Case Study

International consumer warehouse retailer achieves

“impossible task” replacing legacy reporting system
and converting 20,000 reports in just 90 days

SITUATION
Matthew Morris, Lead Data Enabler at an international
consumer wholesaling club based in Washington State with
annual revenue in the multibillion dollar range, had earned
the reputation of being a data rock star during more than 15
years with the company.
He was happily engaged in data science when one day the
assistant vice president for his group—his boss’s boss—
stopped by to say that the company needed to move from
its mainframe based legacy reporting platform. Matthew
needed to figure out what the new platform should be… and
migrate some 20,000 existing reports and queries repre-
senting of “a Frankenstein nest of coding” to the yet to be
determined platform… train 7,000 users on the new system
across nine regional offices located across North America…
and accomplish all of this within 90 days, at which point the
old system had to be unplugged.
The project had the CEO’s attention, and Matthew knew that
he was on point to complete this seemingly impossible task.

Decisive Data | International Warehouse Retailer in Washington State Case Study © DECISIVE DATA
SOLUTION
Impossible? It sure looked that way. But Matthew rolled
up his sleeves, dove in, and—fortunately, as he recalls—
connected with the team from Decisive Data. Together
they created and launched a solution based on Alteryx
and another data solution, guided by Decisive Data’s proj-
ect insights, custom engineering, and technical enable-
ment experience. And, from the perspective of Decisive
Data, it was made possible by the brilliance, drive, and
human engineering genius of Matthew Morris.
The 90-day deadline—unmovable because of licensing is-
sues—was so absolute there wasn’t even time for a proof
of concept. He simply called Decisive Data.
“I had met Decisive Data engineers before at conferences
and meetings, and could immediately see the technical
chops were there,” Matthew Morris says. “When you
meet people like Michael Stead and the other consul-
tants you can see they are very, very smart dudes, but
they don’t come off like rock stars. They are technically
awesome, yet humble. I could see the value in that, espe-
cially for the massive project we were facing.”
AUTOMATION PLEASE
The Decisive Data team and other key company employ-
ees were faced with the mountainous task of converting
some 20,000 reports and queries that had been cob-
bled together over more than a decade from an array of
reporting tools. Mindful of the ultra-tight deadline, they
made a critically important decision: automate as much
of the query conversion as they could using Alteryx.
Therefore, all basic or adhoc queries were moved over to
their new analytical platform and all complex or multi-
step queries were developed in Alteryx.
Decisive Data used Alteryx Designer to create its report
conversion tool—which converted queries and reports
from DB2 SQL and Excel into Oracle SQL. To distribute
this tool and subsequent updates, Alteryx's cloud product
Gallery was shared amongst the three teams that would
be tackling conversion of the 20,000 reports.
Decisive Data | International Warehouse Retailer in Washington State Case Study
“We estimate that the report converter that the Deci-
sive Data team created with Alteryx reduced our report
conversions by at least 90%,” Matthew says. “The report
converter was absolutely essential to our making the
90-day deadline. Without the converter we would still be
converting reports—many months beyond that deadline.”
With the automation in place, the Decisive Data team
was able to focus on resolving exceptions, and to making
updates to the converter whenever they discovered ways
to make it even more efficient.
GAINING FLEXIBILITY
The Decisive Data’s design guidance, and the ease with
which Alteryx can import and process data from diverse
sources was essential to the solution, giving the whole-
saler the flexibility, it needs to grow into the future while
accommodating tools already in use.
“We now have a modern architecture, with Oracle repos-
itories, SAP HANA in-memory computing, Hadoop for
unstructured data, and Azure for cloud-based infrastruc-
ture,” Matthew M says. “Alteryx helps us provide a BI
layer for all of that, while accommodating the CSVs and
Google Sheets that are still in use. We need this flexibility
because we are a global operation that ingests petabytes
of data.”
The ease of use of the new reporting, analytic, and visu-
alization tools are proving popular with the thousands
of users who rely on ad hoc and fixed reports to guide
business decisions.
“Alteryx and Tableau go together like peanut butter and
jelly,” says Michael Stead, Self-Service Analytics Architect
and Alteryx Practice Lead at Decisive Data. “You can use
Alteryx to connect to anything from data warehouses, to
APIs, to flat files. They connect to virtually anything and
can perform the ETL as well as the analytics.”
© DECISIVE DATA
SOLUTION HIP-TO-HIP TRAINING
Decisive Data played an essential role in providing knowl-
edge transfer with a series of trainings across the nine
regions. A particularly effective training strategy was
something Decisive Data called “Office Hours,” in which
they would take up residence within a regional office for
a few weeks and invite users of the new system to come
in with real-life reporting problems and analytical chal-
lenges.
Decisive Data’s Michael Stead refers to this as hip-to-hip
training, in which you help individuals adjust to the new
system (while the old system continued to run in parallel
until it was phased out as individuals were shifted to the
new.)
“First we would provide a two-day training class,” Stead
says. “Then we would shift to Office Hours, which people
really appreciated because they could bring in their very
own challenges and get one-on-one help.”
STRONG PROJECT LEADERSHIP
While Morris is quick to credit Decisive Data and Alteryx,
Decisive Data’s Michael Stead speaks of the extremely
efficient—and humane—leadership of the wholesaler’s
analytics project leader who was responsible for making
the whole process happen, in such a very short time.
“Matthew Morris, the lead data enabler, was brilliant on
several levels,” Stead says. “He’s an analytic rock star—
though Matthew doesn’t like that term—and he’s a rock
star in working with people. Matthew identified an army
of 200 super users across the nine regions, and enlisted
their help and provided them with guidance to help drive
acceptance, because he knew there would be resistance,
especially to our forced-march 90-day deadline.”
Anticipating that some managers would try to pull rank
and deflect his mission-critical campaign, Matthew
went to the company’s vice president for technology
and presented a strategy to get ahead of the anticipated
push back by saying: “You will be contacted. People will
say that giving up their existing reports will disrupt their
Decisive Data | International Warehouse Retailer in Washington State Case Study
“Working with Decisive Data
we were able to accomplish
this impossible task.”
- Matthew Morris, Lead Data Enabler, for an
international consumer warehouse retailer
business. They will say it can’t be done. That there isn’t
time. Replying using these magic words will allow us to
complete this project on time: ‘Please explain to me why
you are unable to adapt to this change when everyone
else in the company can?’”
The magic words did the trick and settled the expected
push back from managers across the globe.
TIPS & TRICKS FOR CHANGE
MANAGEMENT IN CRITICAL
SITUATIONS
Against tremendous odds, the conversion project was
completed within 90 days. The old systems were un-
plugged, the new systems were embraced. Some 20,000
reports were converted. Even now, all parties involved
kind of shake their heads when contemplating what was
accomplished.
Although the hope is that no one is ever asked to do
quite so much, quite so swiftly, here are some Tips &
Tricks that others might find valuable in bringing their
own projects to successful conclusions:
Get Buy-in from the Top. As noted earlier, the Lead Data
Enabler knew there would be plenty of resistance to change.
So when people threated to have their vice president call his
vice president, he was able to reply: “That’s fine, but let me tell
you exactly what my vice president is going to say to your vice
president.” And he never heard more.
© DECISIVE DATA
Choose a Strong Partner. Matthew was quite happy working
as a data scientist when he had the massive conversion project
tossed onto him. “I said, OK, but I’ll need 50 contractors to do
this. In the end they gave me seven. We simply couldn’t have
accomplished this without the strong partnership and expertise
of Decisive Data.”
Be There. The global wholesaler had nine regional offices in
North America, and Matthew along with the Decisive Data train-
ing team, visited the majority for multi-day periods to facilitate
report conversion, training, and adoption.
Identify Thought Leaders. Matthew M analyzed internal
Showcase users and identified some 200 power users that he
contacted, provided specialized early training to, and enlisted to
help ensure acceptance and success.
Be a Conductor, not a Soloist. Matthew, in creating an army
of super users, said it was important to give up the mantle of
being an analytics rock star and instead focus on creating an
orchestra of super users.
Be Creative with Training. Decisive Data designed its two-day
trainings to incorporate the actual day-to-day needs of whatev-
er group they were presenting to. This was followed up by the
popular “Office Hours” labs Decisive Data set up wherever they
went, so users had a week or more to bring specific problems
in for personalized help.
Be Honest. Honesty is always good. The Lead Data Enabler
had been working his magic at the company for more than 15
years, and others looked at him like he was a guru, who just
naturally found things easy to do. But whenever someone said
they hated the new tool, he’d reply: “You know, I hated it too,
until I learned how to use it. At first, I thought, why can’t we just
keep on using Showcase? But this is way better. Let me come
over and help. We can hate the new tools together, until you see
what the new stuff will let you do. You’ll be amazed.”
Use Humor. Humor can also help win over converts. Matthew
Morris recalls: “I used humor like Reagan did with Gorbachev
when he said: ‘You still have that silly wall?’ I’d say, ‘You still
using that old tool?’”
Be a Warrior, When Needed. People wanted meetings, and
more meetings. They wanted to discuss. They wanted to
delay. And the analytics project manager notes: “There was a
lot of fear. Some people had become wizards in using the old
reporting systems. They were afraid to lose this knowledge and
power. Sometimes you needed to be a warrior and simply say:
No! There won’t be a delay. This is happening, and the clock is
already ticking.”
Decisive Data | International Warehouse Retailer in Washington State Case Study
Make a Problem Person Your Best Buddy. “Whenever there
was a problem person—someone loudly opposed to changing
our reporting systems—I wouldn’t ignore or avoid them, I’d
make them my best buddy,” the analytics program manager
says. “I chose not to have an office during the project so I could
always be the field. So if there was a problem person I would sit
my computer down and work right next to them. I’d say: ‘You’re
my buddy, and we’re going to get through this.’”
Sometimes You Have to Let One Go. Sometimes a problem
person was simply unable to accept change—regardless of
how much coaching and support you provide. You can’t let one
person become a fatal time sink. So an element of triage is
required—determining which cases can’t be help so you have
the time and resources to help others.
Ignore the Borders. Matthew learned that he sometimes had
to go beyond the formal boundaries of the project to make
sure everything would work. “Some of our internal Information
Systems people complained to me. I’d come in with a request
and they would say: ‘This is completely out of scope,’” Matthew
Morris says. “I said ‘out of scope doesn’t apply to this project.’
It was more than just converting database queries. We had
to make sure everything would still be up and running. For
instance, some years earlier, some idiot had taught people how
to use Showcase as an ETL tool. And that idiot was me. Fortu-
nately, Decisive Data didn’t care if something was beyond the
original scope. They were just committed to make sure that all
of our new systems would be up and running when we turned
off the legacy stuff.”
Be the Rock Star who Stays to Help Clean Up After the Con-
cert. When the project was over, Morris was eager to return
to being a data scientist. But before he returned to the lab, he
went on a cleanup detail. He said lots of companies will be
doing similar major conversions, and data rock stars will be
drafted. “But if you are going to be a rock star, you have to be
the kind of rock star who stays after the concert, picks up a
broom, and helps the janitor clean up the mess.”
How did he clean up? “When the project was over I did a sweep
of our entire company. I walked into every single cube and
talked to every single person about how they were using the
new system. I didn’t care whether they were technical or not. I
walked through our call center and talked to everybody. That’s
what you have to do. You can’t do a project like this from your
desk or from meeting rooms. You have to go out and be with
your people, from beginning through the very end.”
© DECISIVE DATA
BENEFITS
The international wholesaling club has enjoyed a number Morris liked the fact that the query and report converter
of benefits from engaging with Decisive Data and Alteryx included robust error codes that identified problems in
to help achieve what was widely seen (with the time queries and suggestions on how to fix it. “The converter
constraints) as an undoable task. allowed our teams to do nearly all of the query and report
conversions automatically,” Matthew Morris says. “And
With Decisive Data We were Able to “Accomplish
this Impossible Task” this freed up the Decisive Data team to handle the queue
of exceptions that needed special attention.”
When the 90-day clock started ticking, there was noth-
Moving the Company from Diagnostics Towards
ing abstract about the drop-dead date. Licensing and
Predictive Analytics
support contracts were up for renewal, so there were
contractual reasons why the old system needed to be Mathew Morris notes that Decisive Data has helped his
retired, and the new one needed to be up and running. company move from diagnostics and simple reporting
toward predictive analytics.
That just added to the pressure.
With the old legacy tools, sometimes it was difficult to
“Those who understood the magnitude of what we were
simply pull a report together. “I was called to one per-
doing were frightened,” says Stead. “It was a project
son’s desk who needed help on their old report that was
where the more a person knew about what we were do-
no longer working,” the Lead Data Enabler says. “It was a
ing, the more skeptical they became about our ability to
tangle of code and I said, ‘Who the hell built this?’ Their
succeed. And we all knew there could be no extensions.
reply was: ‘You did, about three years ago.’ I laughed, but
The deadline was just that.”
it had been completely morphed as they tried to make it
“The biggest benefit we gained from working with Deci- do things it simply wasn’t intended to do.”
sive Data is we were able to accomplish this impossible
The combination of Alteryx for analytics and Tableau
task,” says the Lead Data Enabler. “I had never seen or
for data visualization and dashboard displays has freed
heard of any project in which so much had to be accom-
users from legacy technology constraints and opened up
plished in so little time. We simply couldn’t have gotten
new realms for deriving value from data.
there without Decisive Data or Alteryx. We literally would
still be working on converting all those thousands of “We no longer just pull data and validate it,” Matthew
reports.” Morris says. “Any time you can automate—and Alteryx is
powerful for automation—you free people to look at data
Creating a Converter in a Day
in new ways, to ask questions, and explore, to create
Matthew Morris was impressed with how swiftly Deci- predictive analytics simply not conceivable before.”
sive Data created its query converter—especially as a
converter hadn’t even been defined as a need.

“As soon as Decisive Data started working with us they

“The combination of Alteryx for
immediately identified the need for a query convert- analytics and Tableau for data
er,” Matthew Morris says. “Decisive Data’s consultant
actually put together the converter in a single day. There
visualization and dashboard
were no meetings about it, no boards. Because there displays has freed users from legacy
was no time. He built it in 1 day, served as the AI to make
it smarter, and had it up and working for all the teams technology constraints, and opened up
within three days total. That converter saved the day.” new realms for deriving value from data”
– Matthew Morris

Decisive Data | International Warehouse Retailer in Washington State Case Study © DECISIVE DATA
 “We no longer just pull data and validate it. Using Alteryx we were able to
free people to look at data in new ways, to ask questions, and explore to
create predictive analytics that were simply not conceivable before.”
 - Matthew Morris, Lead Data Enabler

Ease of Use

Matthew took an immediate liking to Alteryx: “I'm not
an expert in Alteryx, but I'm an expert when it comes to
data and data analytics, and it didn't take any more than
two seconds to say this is a revelation. We totally need
Alteryx in our company.”
He notes: “The power of Alteryx isn’t to create your BI
layer, its real power is to answer the questions that the BI
layer doesn’t answer. BI is like a restaurant. Everything is
nicely done, but you can only order what’s on the menu.
Alteryx is like having a grocery store and kitchen. You
can create whatever you like.”
He was attracted to the drag-and-drop Alteryx work envi-
ronment. “Alteryx creates a visual story for very complex
SQL statements that you normally might not even be
able to write,” Morris says. “You can visually see: Here’s
query 1, here’s query 2, here’s query 3, here are my sub-
queries, here are my filters, here are my joins. I want to
filter this table before even doing a join, maybe aggregate
some data before the join. A visual story is always going
to be faster than a dialogue story. That’s why people love
Star Wars. It’s a visual story.”

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Decisive Data | International Warehouse Retailer in Washington State Case Study © DECISIVE DATA