Alteryx

PepsiCo, a global consumer packaged goods company, faced a significant challenge in calibrating sales forecasting to supply the right product quantities to its retailers. The sales forecast incorporated a variety of data, including warehouse data, store stock data, and promotional forecast data, all of which were provided by retailers in different file formats and delivered using various methods. The primary challenge was the speed of preparing a sales forecast. With the existing Microsoft Access and Excel-based processes, the time required to prepare this data was so extensive that analysts could only leverage it once a month or not at all. This inefficiency risked under or oversupplying retailers, potentially impacting PepsiCo's business operations and customer relationships.

IQVIA, a global leader in healthcare data and analytics, was grappling with the challenge of managing patient data for up to 70 different clinical studies run by various entities including government agencies, pharmaceutical companies, and academic institutions. The data, originating from 250 unique vendor warehouses, was being copied into a single system using legacy tools and processes like SAS, a process that took several days. Standardizing this data into FDA-compliant formats was another hurdle, requiring 1 to 2 months. As the rate of incoming data from clinical trials increased, and the data became increasingly non-identified and unstructured, IQVIA faced the risk of significant delays. These delays threatened to stall the progress of their clients' clinical studies.

The case study revolves around the use of Monte Carlo simulation for forecasting stock prices. The challenge was to create a sample Alteryx workflow that sources stock price data, performs analysis of the historical prices, uses these metrics to perform Monte Carlo simulations, and then analyzes the output of these simulations to drive business decision making. The aim was to provide an Alteryx template for Monte Carlo simulation-based forecasting that could be used and further enriched by the Alteryx community. The challenge also involved sourcing stock prices from Yahoo Finance, calculating daily percentage change in the stock price, preparing metrics for the simulation, and running the simulation multiple times.

Microsoft Azure is a Cloud Computing platform and infrastructure created by Microsoft for building, deploying, and managing applications and services through a global network of Microsoft-managed data centers. It provides both PaaS and IaaS services and supports many different programming languages, tools and frameworks, including both Microsoft-specific and third-party software and systems. Azure was announced in October 2008 and released on 1 February 2010 as Windows Azure, before being renamed to Microsoft Azure on 25 March 2014.

C3 IoT provides a full-stack IoT development platform (PaaS) that enables the rapid design, development, and deployment of even the largest-scale big data / IoT applications that leverage telemetry, elastic Cloud Computing, analytics, and Machine Learning to apply the power of predictive analytics to any business value chain. C3 IoT also provides a family of turn-key SaaS IoT applications including Predictive Maintenance, fraud detection, sensor network health, supply chain optimization, investment planning, and customer engagement. Customers can use pre-built C3 IoT applications, adapt those applications using the platform’s toolset, or build custom applications using C3 IoT’s Platform as a Service.Year founded: 2009

Altair is a leading provider of enterprise-class engineering software enabling innovation, reduced development times, and lower costs through the entire product lifecycle from concept design to in-service operation. Our simulation-driven approach to innovation is powered by our integrated suite of software which optimizes design performance across multiple disciplines encompassing structures, motion, fluids, thermal management, electromagnetics, system modeling and embedded systems, while also providing data analytics and true-to-life visualization and rendering.

Watson is a question answering computer system capable of answering questions posed in natural language, developed in IBM's DeepQA project by a research team led by principal investigator David Ferrucci. Watson was named after IBM's first CEO and industrialist Thomas J. Watson. The computer system was specifically developed to answer questions on the quiz show Jeopardy!. In 2011, Watson competed on Jeopardy! against former winners Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings. Watson received the first place prize of $1 million. Watson had access to 200 million pages of structured and unstructured content consuming four terabytes of disk storage including the full text of Wikipedia, but was not connected to the Internet during the game. For each clue, Watson's three most probable responses were displayed on the television screen. Watson consistently outperformed its human opponents on the game's signaling device, but had trouble in a few categories, notably those having short clues containing only a few words. In February 2013, IBM announced that Watson software system's first commercial application would be for utilization management decisions in lung cancer treatment at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in conjunction with health insurance company WellPoint. IBM Watson's former business chief Manoj Saxena says that 90% of nurses in the field who use Watson now follow its guidance.

Qlik Technologies Inc (Qlik Technologies) is a developer of software that provides businesses with self-service data visualization, guided analytics applications, embedded analytics and reporting solutions. The company offers user-driven business intelligence (BI) solutions that enable customers to analyze and extract useful information by processing data from multiple sources, and reach better decisions. Qlik Technologies also provides consulting, training and support services. It helps optimize business intelligence by exploiting the collective intelligence of individuals in an organization. The company serves a wide range of industries of various sizes such as consumer products, financial services, retail, public sector; energy and utilities; communications; manufacturing, technology, and healthcare.