Customer: Beachmint

"For cost-conscious start-ups, Pentaho and open source are a no brainer for enabling rapid scale. You can easily compare it to proprietary tools that might not even work."

Deployment Overview

Key Challenges

• Cost-conscious start-up committed to culture of analytics from the beginning; desired solution that could easily scale, handle big data requirements and compete with sophisticated, proprietary solutions on interactive, self-service business analytics and data integration functionality.
• One person doing BI for a 150-person company, unable to keep up with reporting and analytics demands.
• Rapidly growing company with innovative subscription-based business model needed the ability to quickly slice and dice terabytes of data and millions of daily emails. By reporting on every click and page view, BeachMint would be able to perform deep, precise customer segmentation by age, income and behavior.

Pentaho Solution

• Open source big data platform includes MySQL and analytic database management from HP Vertica.
• One end-to-end solution for data integration and business analytics helping to operationalize over one terabyte of data. Pentaho Business Analytics helps BeachMint with social monitoring, customer retention, financial reporting, product and website optimization and more.
• Pentaho Business Analytics deploying data integration (Kettle), reporting, dashboards, analysis, data visualization and predictive analytic capabilities.

Results

• Game changer for customer acquisition – Now have easy access to analysis around cross-selling opportunities and ability to surface data on how much crossover there is between different mint properties such as JEWELMINT, STYLEMINT, BEAUTYMINT and SHOEMINT.
• Operational excellence - BeachMint keeps close tabs on large Facebook and Twitter communities with social monitoring to track data such as fans, likes, favorites, customer product reviews and comments. For example, through data monitoring of their online forums, they identified a coupon code that had leaked out and was being used by customers. Business alerts were set to report on high activity for coupon codes; the problem was spotted and resolved in just two hours and no damage was done. Tracking online chatter identified orders that were affected and stopped them from going out.
• Improved customer experience – BeachMint has gained a deeper understanding of customer preferences by looking beyond averages of numbers to provide segmentation of customers by age, income bracket and behavior. Customer insights influence inventory purchases, website design, BeachMint’s recommendation engine and more.
• Eliminated costly and manual report generation - Nearly every department has 1-2 people using BI, creating quantitative experts in every group who can easily wear a BI cap on a daily basis. The self-service capabilities of Pentaho Business Analytics has provided a scalable solution, eliminating the need to hire more engineers and data scientist, who are in short supply.
• Maximized revenue - Analytics play a huge role with customer acquisition, allowing BeachMint to determine where it can acquire users most cost-effectively and generate the most revenue from customers. This understanding of data has resulted in improved sales forecasting, as well as customer retention and continuity programs to minimize customer churn.

Why Pentaho

• Product vision in line with company’s data-driven needs – focused on making BI accessible to employees of all levels of BI knowledge in the wake of shortage of data scientists and engineers
• Fast, feature-rich platform handles the requirements of a big data environment and integrates with Vertica
• Attractive price point for flexible product that covers many bases