Alteryx Designer for Pharmaceutical Use Cases
Alteryx Designer is a powerful tool suited for many different challenges in the domain of data science. It delivers strong capabilities for data ingestion, preparation (or wrangling), getting insights and distributing (or exporting) them to the right places. All of this is not only available ad-hoc but can also be easily automated and replicated for re-occurring tasks. Designer is industry-agnostic and, however, very suitable for use cases in the pharmaceutical manufacturing space.
Data Ingestion and Preparation
Take for example the data ingestion process. It is easy to import data from many different sources, be it local data in Excel or Text format or from central data sources like databases and warehouses. With Alteryx Designer’s drag and drop capabilities and easy to use UI you are well suited to accessing the data without needing to consult with your IT department to provide dedicated extracts or the right format.
Following the ingestion process you can easily merge multiple data sources by connecting them with the appropriate tool and configuring it with a couple of clicks. This completely avoids the need to learn languages like SQL and gives anybody the capability to combine the data sources needed for analysis. Designer is capable to handle very large data sets in the process. Far larger than what you came to expect form Excel for example.
Custom Tools
Designer’s vast preparation capabilities can be extended with custom tools suited for your specific use case. These can be packaged, distributed, and replicated as so-called macros. A macro can be considered a “sub procedure” that is being called from your “main program” but with the addition of a user interface to configure the specifics of your needs in the concrete use case. Don’t be fooled though: a macro is still created in a visual environment you or your team can design by arranging and orchestrating tools in the form of a workflow. A macro can have a custom icon to be easily identifiable and the macro’s UI can be as lean or as complex as you or your team require.
Analyzing and Understanding
After the data preparation you might want to analyze and understand your data better. Designer has a lot of tools available for that as well. Visualization and reporting capabilities satisfy many needs out of the box. If you need more than that or have some specific requirements, it is a good idea to visit Alteryx’s active community that can provide you with a lot of pre-built solutions (as workflows or macros) that you can easily use and integrate and tailor to your needs.
Distribution and Expansion
When it comes to results (tabular or graphical), you can easily export or distribute them where you need them to be. Storing them to disk, to database or sending them via email is only a configuration away.
This way you can also orchestrate additional software tools in combination with Designer. Where Designer has its strengths in the data preparation and the automation of said processes, a dashboarding software like Spotfire is more suited towards a flexible visualization of the results. If you need your users to be able to “touch” the data, drill, zoom and explore in a more flexible fashion, Spotfire is perfectly suited for that.
Both tools play strongly together and can be nicely integrated: by transferring data from one tool to the other as well as by being able to trigger functions in the other tool when needed.
The Big Picture
Your suite of data science tools converges to enhance their individual features, thereby bolstering your team’s capabilities, and ultimately, painting the big picture of data science within your organization. Equip yourself with the appropriate tools tailored to each challenge. Once you and your solutions are prepared, seamlessly transition them to servers for distribution, management, and automation. This ensures that the applied data science, encapsulated within these tools, seamlessly integrates into your organization’s processes.
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