Morton Salt
Customer & challenge
Morton Salt is an American food company producing salt for food, water conditioning, industrial, agricultural, and road/highway use. With over 20 facilities, the company is North America’s leading producer and marketer of salt. The customer is using Alteryx to create Tableau reports that show production data for different manufacturing areas. On a daily basis, the report users can see what was produced, versus what is required by the supply chain network.
The customer already had an existing production data feed from SAP ERP into SAP BW cubes which is refreshed twice daily. The process of getting the required SAP data into Alteryx and subsequently into the Tableau reports was very manual and time-consuming. It required an SAP Analyst to manually run several queries in SAP’s own query tool and then save the results to a text file. The text files were then shared with the Alteryx user. The process took 30-45 minutes each day and could only be done on workdays, not on weekends.
“Xtract for Alteryx was a huge improvement for our production group.”
Senior Analyst, Operations Team
Solution with Xtract for Alteryx
With Xtract for Alteryx, the manual steps by the SAP Analyst and text files to share the data could be eliminated. The Alteryx user now has direct access to SAP data, including from SAP BW cubes, and the data is fed directly into the Alteryx workflow. Different SAP source components are available from the Alteryx Tools Palette, ranging from SAP Table, Function, ODP, Report, Cube, to Hierarchy. The process can be fully automated with the Alteryx Scheduler and as a result, the customer is now able to generate production reports seven days a week. Dynamic date ranges can be used to
create reports with a rolling time window. With the initial success of Xtract for Alteryx, the customer is planning to expand the usage of the tool to SAP ERP data sources and the creation of snapshot reports for maintenance work orders.
Challenge
Manual, time-consuming effort to create daily
reports for production metrics
Departments
Supply Chain Management
System environment
SAP BW, SAP ECC, Alteryx Designer and Server,
Tableau
Advantages
» Self-service SAP data access for the Business Analyst
» Drag & drop configuration of SAP data feeds, complete no-code
» SAP ERP and SAP BW source objects, large volume or incremental data
» Automation & scale with Alteryx Server and Scheduler
» Short time to solution
» Low TCO compared to other solutions or SAP development approach
