Last Thursday evening the first Milwaukee Alteryx User Group (MAUG) meeting was held at the Baird offices. Starting with pizza and soda at 4:45pm provided by AE Business Solutions the meeting transitioned to a welcome and introductions. The group is being lead by Robert Farley of Health Payment Systems, John Heisler of Health Payment Systems, Matt Christen of Baird, Mark Hohensee of Baird, Alex Christensen of AE Business Solutions, Tessa Jahnke of AE Business Solutions, and Sam Lachterman of AE Business Solutions. Outside of those individuals there was representation from Northwestern Mutual and Johnson Controls who aren’t currently using Alteryx, IMS Health who is using the tool for its geocoding capabilities, and Artisan Partners among others.
John Heisler began the presentations with an overview of HPS’s implementation and use of Alteryx which was over my head as they are using it as a replacement to a data warehouse. It is certainly an interesting use case and I’m sure pushes the boundaries of the purpose of the tool.
Matt Christen did a quick-fire demo showing us how he used Alteryx to find cabins within a certain range of a vacation spot. From the Minocqua website he manually copied cabin locations into Excel, then used the public Alteryx gallery tool to geocoding them. His next step was to put the data into Alteryx to essentially only show locations within a 6 mile radius of the center of town. It was a very interesting demonstration and something I would definitely consider doing as well. My pain point would be manually copying the data into Excel. I would much prefer to automate that process using some sort of web scraping ability.
Alex Christensen provided another example using the in-database tools which puts the processing power on the database and not the machine that runs the Alteryx workflow.
Next up was John Fomby of Alteryx who showed the group the road map for the next year. Some cool things are definitely on their way in Q2, but I’m more excited about the second half of the year.
Overall it was a great first meeting. The presentations provided wonderful examples of what is possible. I liked the breakout discussions at the end and I might use that same idea in a Tableau User Group meeting but I would assigned high-level topics so members could get the most out of the discussion.
