Customer: Sheetz

"By putting Pentaho analysis in the hands of business users, we enabled them to build exactly what they want when they want it resulting in eliminating seven hours per week from IT creating reports"

Deployment Overview

Key Challenges

• Wanted a solution to reduce the use of Access and Excel as reporting tools and minimize strategic reporting against production systems.
• Business users needed to bypass the IT roadblock that frequently arose because reports would fall last on the priority list and users often did not have a clear definition of what they needed.
• Needed a simple, reporting technology that would provide self-service reporting and analytics to users across all departments.

Pentaho Solution

• To help ramp up and aid in deployment, Sheetz engaged Pentaho Consulting for a long-term engagement. As a testament to Pentaho's top-tier consulting services, Rodrigo Haces of Pentaho was named as a Sheetz 2011 IT Vendor of the Year.
• The reporting capability of Pentaho Business Analytics is now the reporting tool of record at Sheetz. Pentaho is connected to many Sheetz production systems for reporting and the team set up automatic report distribution methods to minimize the use of email to distribute reports.
• Rolled out the analysis capability of Pentaho Business Analytics to slice and dice multi-dimensional sales data with the goal to empower business users to do the analysis before creating reports.
• In an effort to move to an enterprise data and reporting strategy, Sheetz selected both Teradata and Pentaho to provide the infrastructure, tools and support to achieve a common infrastructure.

Results

• Confidence in the ability to grow and expand with Pentaho - Sheetz's original objective was to only deploy a small implementation of ad hoc and canned reports. With rapid success of the project and positive feedback from the business users, the company decided to increase the scope of their project to include Pentaho analysis and have once again experienced company-wide success.
• High Scalability - The Pentaho Business Analytics system has 30 regular users and 80 logins. Sheetz is currently analyzing 2.1 terabytes of data from their Teradata data warehouse.
• Ability to make better decisions faster that increase the company's bottom line - All business users from the Finance Director to the maintenance department have a consolidated view of data.
• Quick time to value - Sheetz deployed the initial project within three months with upgrades each year to enable greater functionality.
• Eliminated reliance on IT - In total, marketing has eliminated approximately seven hours per week that were spent creating reports.

Why Pentaho

• Strong reporting and analysis capabilities
• Professional support
• Low cost of ownership