Customer: The Lewis Group

"Pentaho solved two major problems for us at opposite ends of the technology spectrum – reporting on the front end and ETL on the back. Overcoming the technical ETL challenges in particular were fundamental to our being able to deliver the new management intelligence system. Pentaho’s integration tools are ideally fit for this purpose while being very easy to use."

Deployment Overview

Key Challenges

• The legacy reporting system had too many stages and opportunities to fail. Data was extracted, then imported into SAS and Excel to produce standard reports, then published via web interfaces.
• Key principle in transforming the management intelligence (MI) system was to produce fewer and more frequent reports that flagged ‘exceptions’ so that problems could be diagnosed before escalating.
• Needed to produce detailed statistical reporting on a daily basis to track company, team and individual performance against established KPIs. The incumbent system could only run reports on a monthly basis.
• With a rapidly expanding customer base, the lewis group had to choose between adding more IT people to support its current reporting system or modernizing its systems to create extra capacity.

Pentaho Solution

• Pentaho Gold Partner, Millersoft supported the MI team to develop reports, establish KPIs and design the ETL logic for the dashboards.
• Pentaho Business Analytics generates three types of enterprise reporting and dashboards for managing internal operations and client performance.
• Pentaho Data Integration manages ETL (extract/transfer/load) and data integration to streamline reporting process.

Results

• Individual performance scorecards – these dashboards measure individual performance for employees like debt collectors, who have specific targets for collection and quality each month and paid bonuses against those targets.
• Better reports, same resources – by automating the ETL and streamlining the reporting process, Pentaho freed staff to focus on analysing and acting on information. Crucially, the new, improved MI process didn’t require any more people to support it.
• Departmental reports – these reports are based on aggregated client data and run at a departmental level (for example, by office or team). These measure business performance as a whole.
• Delivered key client ‘RAG’ reports - RAG (red / amber / green) reports that present information on how the lewis group is performing for its key clients against budget expectations. The reports present KPIs (key performance indicators) that show, for example, how much, how fast and how effectively it is able to collect debt on specific clients’ behalf. Each KPI is presented in a dashboard, with a red, amber or green light, providing an early warning system so that problems can be fixed before they escalate. RAG reports are live and initially rolled out to 15 senior managers, cascaded down to managers as needed.
• Key client ‘RAG’ reports - RAG (red / amber / green) reports present information about how the lewis group is performing for its key clients against budget expectations. The reports present KPIs (key performance indicators) that show, for example, how much, how fast and how effectively it is able to collect debt on specific clients’ behalf. Each KPI is presented in a dashboard, with a red, amber or green light, providing an early warning system so that problems can be fixed before they escalate. Currently, RAG reports are live and rolled out to 15 senior managers.

Why Pentaho

• Availability of wide range of plug-ins
• Low cost relative to enterprise BI solutions with similar functionality
• Exceptional data integration and visualization tools
• Commercial open source model
• High security