Workrise

Workrise: Consolidating Analytics on Hex

Workrise established a Data Enablement team in 2020, with the mission to enable everyone across the company to work with and understand data.

Problem

Many ad-hoc projects and apps were sprouting up across Workrise. Some analysts preferred writing Python and some preferred SQL. And for each language, analysts would use different tools. Having multiple analytics tools made it difficult to collaborate and build on each other’s work. Everyone also used a separate data tool for visualization — this really slowed down the analytics workflow. After your exploratory work, you had to prepare a finished data set and then recreate the visuals in the visualization tool.

There was too much friction for analysts to connect to data, collaborate on code, and create a visual for the rest of the organization.

Solution

Workrise’s Data Enablement team set out to find a cloud-native, collaborative notebook solution that supported SQL, python, and no code visualizations. They evaluated a few notebook options as well as legacy BI solutions and selected Hex.

“Our Director of Analytics asked if I’d heard of Hex. I checked it out, created an account, logged in, and fell in love right away,” said Jordan. “In our evaluation, we could connect to tables in Snowflake, manipulate and join them, and then visualize and present our insights in an executive-level format.”

SQL and Python in one notebook

What initially stood out to the Workrise team about Hex was that “in five minutes we can connect to our Snowflake data warehouse, we can start writing SQL, Python, and we can produce low-code visualizations.” The Workrise team had prior experience using other solutions for building data apps, but those solutions required a lot of effort to set up. Hex makes everything simple with first class integration with Snowflake and pre-installing python packages in every notebook.

“It’s been a game-changer for our organization,” said Jordan. “We have a population of Python-first analysts, and I want to empower them to do the best work they can, and that is what Hex brought them."

Share Analytics with the Organization

Hex allows the Workrise team to take their explorations in a notebook and select the relevant visualizations and data to present in interactive dashboards with their org. They can create input fields and filters to allow stakeholder to further explore the data on their own. Hex dramatically accelerates the time to value of the Data and Analytics team’s work by making this dashboard creation process intuitive.

“During our Trial of Hex, we actually used it to facilitate a use case that would be presented to our Board,” noted Jordan. “I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a little nervous at first, but Hex delivered. We loved the flexibility in reporting and visualizations so that we could construct the end deliverable application in just the right way for our audience.”

Result

Workrise now has over 50 people creating all of their analyses in Hex. It supports all their analytics needs and has allowed them to go from many tools down to 1. This has resulted in much less tool fatigue, much faster analytics cycles, and a much more secure data environment.