Customer: Specsavers

"Specsavers is renowned for its highly popular "two for one" eyeglass offer, but this promotion requires analysts to view data at the order level, so they can see which pairs of choices are most popular; aggregated data has no value. With Pentaho Business Analytics we can now analyze these cross-sales patterns, which inform our marketing campaigns, procurement planning and other processes."

Deployment Overview

Key Challenges

• Needed global technology refresh to transform its regional IT infrastructure with disparate back-office and corporate systems to having standard technology platforms across the company.
• Historically maintained multiple different monthly reports, which took too long to consolidate and were prone to human error.
• Specsavers wanted to provide managers working in its ten head offices with a self-service business intelligence tool for analyzing sales data and generating financial reports.

Pentaho Solution

• Specsavers chose to implement Pentaho Business Analytics and Pentaho Data Integration in several countries, starting in newer markets, where there is less historical data to analyze. Specsavers will continue to roll out Pentaho software in more mature markets over the next 2-3 years.

Results

• Less reliance on IT with super user data analysts being trained on Pentaho, freeing up IT resources for back end development.
• Head office managers now receive monthly reports in a single, standardized format.
• Pentaho Business Analytics applications successfully rolled out in test markets to 25 head office managers and approximately 200 planners in the warehouses and labs.

Why Pentaho

• Breadth of business intelligence capabilities including data integration, which Specsavers required to extract and integrate information from different point-of-sale systems into its MySQL-based data warehouse and Oracle ERP systems.
• Self-service features that enable its head office managers to easily design their own custom reports to analyze data unique to their country's stores, like available eyeglass styles. These also reduce the need for IT support.
• Commercial open source technology - the global technology refresh specified a preference for open source technology for its favorable cost structure and open architecture, which is easier to integrate and customize.