Customer: ModCloth

"ModCloth is a high-growth company that believes in data-driven decision making. In this environment, it is crucial that business users at all levels are able to access the exact information they need at that exact moment. Pentaho helped us in building a self-serve culture in reporting."

Deployment Overview

• ModCloth decided to start using the open source version of Pentaho. However, as the company began to scale there was a need to move to the enterprise version.
• As an online retailer that is on a high growth trajectory, ModCloth was interested in a reporting tool that enabled its business users to directly access information whenever they wanted it and in the mode they wanted it. ie. some business users needed more visuals, while others needed Excel sheets that could be further modified.
• In its early stage, the company also needed a reporting solution that wasn’t extremely engineering dependent and could be built by very SQL savvy analysts.

• ModCloth deployed the enterprise version of Pentaho Business Analytics with MySQL through the hosting provider Joyent.
• Having developed the reports in the open source version of Pentaho, ModCloth’s analysts and engineers were adept with Pentaho. However, in order to speed up the deployment Pentaho, consultants were brought on site to install, train and build some reports. This helped the ModCloth analytics and BI team gain an advanced understanding of Pentaho.
• The ModCloth team built a series of reports, ranging from reports that were emailed to users, reports with interactive reports, to OLAP cubes for advanced users.

• The slice and dice capabilities of the OLAP cubes helped business users in analyzing particular issues and also identifying future reporting requirements.
• Pentaho has helped ModCloth employees in functions such as Finance, Service, Product, Merchandising and Buying access specific reports when they need them. Pentaho’s self-serve capability has allowed ModCloth to distribute the analytical workload and enabled the Analytics team to focus on building the foundational / advanced blocks of its intelligence platform.
• Through Pentaho, ModCloth was able to create reports that catered to different business user needs. The interactive parameters in reporting and flexibility offered through the OLAP cubes helped the analytics team meet reporting needs from finance to merchandising through one report/cube. Business users were able to save versions specific to their own needs instead of relying on the analytics team to build custom versions.