Automating Regulatory Compliance: A Case Study on BT's Transformation with Alteryx and PwC

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BT Group, the UK’s leading telecommunications and network provider, had to comply with strict reporting regulations due to its public service nature. The company was using over 140 legacy Excel models to run its regulatory processes, a process they named the ‘Cascade’. The Cascade required a large team and took up to four weeks for a single run, and had to be run multiple times before the reports were ready to be published each year. This process was not only time-consuming but also resource-intensive. Additionally, BT faced challenges with cumbersome change control due to complex logic buried deep in cell formulas, making it difficult to audit changes in Excel. The risk of errors was high with 140 complex Excel models, and even very small errors needed to be reported to regulators. Knowledge management was also a challenge as Excel isn’t the best tool for annotation and knowledge transfers, especially with 1,500 unique data inputs requiring specific methodologies.

BT Group (BT) is the UK’s leading telecommunications and network provider and a leading provider of global communications services and solutions, serving customers in 180 countries. Its principal activities in the UK include the provision of fixed voice, mobile, broadband, and TV (including sport) and a range of products and services over converged fixed and mobile networks to consumer, business, and public sector customers. BT provides managed services, security and network and IT infrastructure services to support global customers’ operations all over the world. As a company that services the public, BT must comply with strict reporting regulations to protect consumers as well as maintain healthy market competitiveness.

BT, in collaboration with Alteryx and PwC, trained nearly 50 employees over a two-week period through a mixture of self-serve learning materials from Alteryx Academy and formal sessions. They then began working in an agile, sprint-guided approach which allowed them to successfully re-platform the 140+ Excel-based cascading models in just over 16 weeks. Leveraging the simplicity of building in Alteryx, BT and PwC developed workflows using a set of “golden standards.” This included a standard set of rules around which tools to use, relative paths, ensuring calculations were dynamic, and other conventions to aid teamwork. Using Alteryx servers, BT crunched through millions of lines of data and was able to achieve their first initiative of making regulatory modeling both faster and easier to complete. Alteryx’s native in-workflow commentary functionality helped BT achieve model transparency and simplify change control and audits. To accomplish their third initiative, BT embedded links within workflows that led to the relevant documentation within their Confluence instance. This made navigation through workflows seamless for audits, reviews, and handover purposes.

• The transformation brought about by Alteryx and PwC resulted in faster and easier modeling, with a 75% reduction in man-hours required to run the cascade. The transparency of the models was improved, allowing analysts and auditors to quickly understand what the model is doing and complete their work. Knowledge management was significantly improved with the new Alteryx-powered cascade, combined with Confluence, allowing the BT team to provide a transparent, scalable, and repeatable regulatory reporting process. The reduction in manual effort will allow BT to recover the costs of the transparency project within a year while improving their service to the regulating committee. A range of supporting workflows will help the team identify changes to the data or workflows and streamline audit processes.

• 140+ legacy Excel models replaced with Alteryx
• 46 members of the BT team upskilled in 2 weeks
• 75 % reduction in time to insight