In today’s rapidly evolving business environment, harnessing data to derive actionable decision-making insights is crucial to respond to multifaceted challenges quickly. Faced with making decisions against a constant backdrop of economic uncertainty, leading real estate developer ROSHN put data-driven insights at the heart of decision-making.
ROSHN Group is Saudi Arabia’s most trusted multi-asset class real estate developer and a giga-project wholly owned by the Kingdom’s Public Investment Fund. ROSHN is playing a significant role in raising the nation’s homeownership rate to 70 percent by 2030. The lofty goal is part of Vision 2030, a project aimed at diversifying the nation’s economy and improving the quality of life for the Kingdom’s citizens. This includes working with numerous construction and design companies and a large amount of dispersed data sets scattered across various sources to achieve the scale of the ROSHN mandate.
Adnan Amro, associate director of the Enterprise Project Management Office at ROSHN, described the challenges associated with rapidly discovering, structuring, cleaning, enriching and validating large volumes of data associated with managing real estate projects. “The amount of data is growing, so it’s not only the scale that’s big but the more projects we launch, the more people join the team, the more there is a need for a centralized data pipeline and a single source of truth,” he said.
Gaining a holistic view of disparate data sets
With the goal of transforming the housing sector in the Kingdom by building integrated communities that offer Saudi residents a new way of living, time to insight has become a critical driving force for success and the teams at ROSHN. Due to its size, teams at ROSHN constantly work with vast and diverse data assets from multiple sources such as systems, reports, market research, and spreadsheets. Moreover, Amro and his team of analysts also manage data on the corporate side of the business, including finance, HR, sales and marketing. Given the sprawl of data sets and such a large scale of data and reporting requests, the team needed to automate the collection and analysis processes and consolidate this decentralized data landscape into a single data pipeline.
“With so much available data and requests for reports, partnering with Alteryx has been instrumental in our journey to become a data-driven organization,” said Abdulrahman Alharbi, manager of the Enterprise Project Management Office at ROSHN.
“Prioritizing the democratization of data and analytics has been critical to getting the most out of our data and enabling speed of insight. The centralized data platform and real-time decision-making capabilities have empowered us to make actionable data insights available to everyone.”
Real-time data insights drive company-wide impact
ROSHN accelerated efforts to develop a data-first culture by leveraging Alteryx Analytics Automation Platform across the organization.
The team now uses the Alteryx platform to collect data from multiple sources, then prepare and transform the data for storage in an on-premises SQL server, providing a centralized location for easy data consumption — all while saving time and driving efficiencies across different teams and processes. Easy-to-build workflows within the Alteryx platform are where the real magic happens for the team — replacing repetitive, manual work hours with automated workflows. ROSHN’s commitment to data-driven decision-making extends across its workforce, with approximately 500 employees and senior leadership teams relying on dashboards and reports prepared using Alteryx to drive informed decision-making.
“Once the data workflow is created and tested, it gets scheduled, and the Alteryx platform always reflects the latest data for us, which we can pull at any given time,” said Lamyaa Alyousef, officer of the Enterprise Project Management Office at ROSHN. “It’s a matter of refreshing our dashboards or reports. It’s not a matter of reinventing the wheel every single time.”
The impact of the Alteryx platform on ROSHN’s operations has been significant in facilitating better decision-making processes. ROSHN is now automating many of the data processes associated with uncovering valuable insights, identifying trends, and making data-driven investment decisions by consolidating data from systems, reports, market research, and other sources. Additionally, automating the data preparation and generation process for reports has helped the team save circa 120 working hours weekly, empowering them to work on other high-value tasks.
“Partnering with Alteryx has been instrumental in our journey to become a data-driven organization. The automation of data extraction and preparation processes saved significant time and has empowered us to identify market trends, make informed investment decisions, drive operational efficiencies, and elevate our position as a leading developer in the region,” added Amro.
The key aspects of the platform that have been instrumental for ROSHN are the user-friendly, low-code Alteryx Designer and Alteryx Server. The diverse combinations of tools provided by Alteryx Designer and access to hundreds of data connectors have addressed the data preparation challenges faced by ROSHN. The accessible analytics platform enables analysts and data workers to easily collaborate, create, extract, transform, and load workflows to provide timely data sets that are always current and always available, facilitating the transformation of raw data into cross-functional reports that analysts and domain experts can leverage. Meanwhile, Alteryx Server helps govern the workflow process and schedule the analytic processing to automatically deliver reporting and dashboards to supply timely, up-to-date insights to the teams when they need them.
Empowering real-time, data-driven decision-making at scale
Alteryx is showing great promise at ROSHN. Teams are benefiting from innovative data-driven practices, and embracing insight-based decision-making as the cornerstone of their operations. This has helped elevate ROSHN’s position as a leading developer in the region. Amro already has future plans to leverage more capabilities. At a time when mastering data and converting it into actionable insights is becoming increasingly critical to decision-making, his team is testing machine learning models based on historical data and plans to further enhance the models to provide predictive analysis.
