Case Study: British American Tobacco achieves £7M in benefits and rapid, automated analytics with Alteryx

British American Tobacco Generated £7M in Benefit using Alteryx

British American Tobacco (BAT), a 115‑year‑old tobacco and nicotine company operating in 200+ markets, faced a strategic inflection as smoking rates declined and the need to treat data as an asset grew. Their analytics were hampered by heavily governed SAP systems, time‑consuming manual data prep (consuming over 60% of shared services time), and IT bottlenecks, leaving little capacity for rapid innovation, “fail fast” experiments, or deeper customer insight.

BAT introduced Alteryx in 2016 and scaled from an 8‑person pilot to widespread adoption, using the platform to complete a portfolio‑complexity analysis in six weeks that would otherwise have taken a year. By automating ETL and repeatable reporting, sharing workflows via Alteryx Server, and building an internal community for data literacy, BAT generated £7M in benefits in the first year while accelerating proof‑of‑concepts, reducing manual work, and embedding analytics into the business roadmap.

British American Tobacco

Dharini Chandrashekhar

Operations Analytics + Insights SME