Customer: WebAssign

"We would have blinders on without Pentaho. Pentaho is providing the information we actually need to stay in business."

Deployment Overview

Key Challenges

• Data was spread across various databases, spreadsheets, Google documents, and customized code in the WebAssign web application, complicating efforts to compile and analyze the data. As a result, WebAssign executives lacked insight into critical information, such as which textbooks were most popular and by how much.
• Because WebAssign distributes educational materials to more than 600,000 students worldwide each semester, the amount of data generated exceeded the capabilities of their legacy data analysis tool.
• For each new report that executives wanted to run, WebAssign needed a developer to write custom code, which resulted in a backlog of IT requests and severely limited the types of data reports that could be created.

Pentaho Solution

• Data visualization has further simplified data analysis for users across the organization, enabling agile reporting and automatically creating custom reports.
• WebAssign has also taken advantage of Pentaho’s professional support and training courses, helping them to get maximum value out of their business analytics.
• Data discovery and analysis capabilities help WebAssign’s 140 employees to easily perform drag-and-drop analysis, uncovering new trends and information in the data.
• Data access and integration capabilities automatically aggregate WebAssign’s data from across the enterprise and populate data models for the finance and sales departments.

Results

• Improved Bottom Line - Pentaho Business Analytics has given WebAssign a better view into its complicated revenue model.
• Increased Customer Satisfaction - WebAssign is leveraging its data for valuable insights that improve both business operations and student learning.
• Enhanced data visualization – Pentaho Business Analytics dashboard capability with Community Dashboard Framework (CDF) enable WebAssign to visualize data in different ways, such as creating histograms to easily see how much time students are spending on homework.
• Reduced IT costs – Because employees across the organization are now able to analyze data and run reports on their own without the need for additional code, WebAssign’s IT resources are freed up to focus on other issues.
• Critical element to company success – Pentaho’s end-to-end analytics platform has transformed company operations.

Why Pentaho

• Modern and scalable end-to-end software platform.
• Ability to quickly analyze large volumes of data.
• Flexible, customizable reporting with highly professional, attractive interface designs out-of-the-box.