How Smurfit Westrock Scaled Self-Service Analytics to 700+ Global Users Through a Five-Year Strategic Partnership with Aimpoint Digital
How our five-year partnership with a leading global packaging retailer scaled self-service analytics across 20+ departments and 6 countries, enabling 700+ users, and accelerating value realization following a merger.
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The Challenge
Recognizing the potential of self-service analytics to unlock operational efficiency and financial savings, Smurfit Westrock invested in Alteryx to empower users across the enterprise.
To support this investment, the organization established a Self-Service Analytics team within Finance, challenged with:
- Upskilling business users across regions and languages
- Driving adoption beyond Finance into operational functions
- Quantifying the financial value of analytics investments
- Establishing scalable governance across users
Complicating this effort was a recent merger, which increased pressure to rapidly demonstrate value from technology investments while aligning analytics practices across a larger, more complex organization.
As adoption accelerated, the organization faced additional challenges such as:
- Limited visibility into how Alteryx workflows were being used
- Risk exposure within a large Server environment
- No standardized process to identify, prioritize, and track value
The organization needed a structured approach to scale enablement, quantify impact, and proactively govern their self-service platforms.
Our Approach
Over a five-year partnership, Aimpoint Digital served as both strategic advisor and hands-on implementation partner, building and scaling a governed self-service analytics program for Alteryx and the Power Platform.
Structured Enablement at Enterprise Scale
Aimpoint Digital designed and operationalized a Self-Service Center of Excellence (COE) to provide structure, governance, and measurable impact.
Key elements included:
- Establishment of a 120+ member Champion Program, spanning 20+ departments and 6 countries
- Delivery of 166 bilingual training sessions across Alteryx and the Power Platform
- Upskilling 720 users across Finance, Operations, Sales, Pricing, and Supply Chain
- Development of standardized intake, prioritization, and value tracking frameworks.
This structured enablement model expanded analytics beyond Finance, embedding capabilities across business functions while maintaining governance and alignment.
Value Realization
To quickly surface high impact opportunities, Aimpoint Digital designed a six-week enterprise showcase competition called “Innovate to Impact.”
This competition:
- Engaged business teams across functions
- Prioritized use case based on financial impact, scalability, and feasibility
- Identified five high-value projects delivering $250K in projected savings and automation of 5,000 hours of previously manual effort
This structured pipeline became the foundation for prioritizing high-impact projects on a yearly basis.
In addition to this showcase, the team delivered a prioritized project tracker, which collected 225 analytics initiatives across the organization and provided the team visibility into those with the highest potential impact.
High-Impact Project Delivery
Aimpoint Digital built the highest-priority solutions identified to accelerate returns. Among these, the Profit Margin Compression project (surfaced from the Innovate to Impact Competition) pinpointed causes of recent margin compression, combining data ingestion and prep in Alteryx with a user-friendly Power BI front end. Within eight months of deployment, this solution:
- Enabled Sourcing, Pricing, and Sales teams to collaborate and uncover an estimated $1.7M in cost savings and pricing opportunities
- Improved alignment between Sourcing, Pricing, and Sales
- Provided faster identification of margin erosion drivers
This project became a flagship example of how governed self-service analytics could directly impact enterprise profitability.
Best-in-Class Governance
With a large Alteryx estate, governance of individual licenses and server environments became critical.
Aimpoint Digital deployed ServerPAHL and DesignerPAHL, providing:
- Enterprise-wide visibility into workflow activity, both locally and on server
- Identification of business-critical processes
- Risk exposure monitoring
- Citizen developer performance insights
Prior to an Alteryx Server upgrade, ServerPAHL:
- Systematically scanned the entire estate
- Identified 66 workflows that would have broken post upgrade
- Enabled targeted preemptive remediation
This intervention prevented a major post-upgrade IT incident and reinforced the value of proactive governance.
Ongoing Advisory
As the organization's business and technology landscape continues to evolve, Aimpoint Digital remains an active advisor on the direction of its self-service analytics program .
Results
The initiative enabled Sourcing, Pricing, and Sales teams to collaborate and uncover an estimated $1.7M in cost savings and pricing opportunities. In total, 122,711 hours of reducible manual effort, supported by a structured pipeline of 225 initiatives. This work also gave executives clear, high-level visibility into the return on their Alteryx investment.
The program expanded beyond Finance into Operations, Sales, Pricing, and Supply Chain. Alongside this growth, adoption scaled significantly across the organization, with 120+ Champions established across more than 20 departments and 720 users trained across multiple regions, supported by 166 bilingual training sessions.
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The organization gained full visibility into its Alteryx estate, allowing teams to proactively prevent workflow failures before they occurred. Multi-year usage data now guides license optimization decisions, while clear differentiation between business-critical and low-risk processes ensures governance efforts are focused where they matter most.
Key Takeaways
This case study demonstrates that a self-service analytics program creates sustainable business value when enablement, governance, and value realization are scaled together. Over five years, Smurfit Westrock transformed self-service analytics from a niche capability into an enterprise-wide program supporting more than 720 users across multiple regions, functions, and languages.
Aimpoint’s approach combined structured upskilling, champion-led adoption, proactive governance, and value-focused delivery to help the organization build lasting analytics capabilities. The result was a governed analytics ecosystem that expanded adoption across Finance, Operations, Sales, Pricing, and Supply Chain while providing leadership with clear visibility into platform usage, business impact, and risk.
By treating self-service analytics as both a technology investment and an organizational capability, Smurfit Westrock established the foundation for continued operational efficiency, scalable innovation, and data-driven decision making across the enterprise.
Schedule a Self-Service Analytics Consultation
For analytics leaders looking to scale adoption, strengthen governance, or establish a Center of Excellence, schedule a 30-minute scoping discussion to assess your current program maturity and identify opportunities to accelerate value realization.
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