Specsavers, a major eyewear and healthcare retailer, harnessed the power of a strategic collaboration between Red Hat and Pentaho, bolstered by GrayMatter's expertise, to address their intricate data challenges. They grappled with data collation and analysis, inconsistent metrics due to diverse store systems, and a laborious, manual process reliant on Excel.
The solution was rooted in Pentaho, deployed on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux OS. GrayMatter played a pivotal role, actively partnering with Pentaho. They transformed CSV data into a dynamic data warehouse using Pentaho's ETL tool, Kettle. A user-friendly interface allowed online and PDF users to access a range of dashboards and reports, enhancing analysis and report generation.
Results were impressive: consistent metrics across countries, effortless analyses for users, and a focus on strategic decision-making. Pentaho's cost-effectiveness, enterprise-ready capabilities, and GrayMatter's implementation expertise fortified Specsavers' data-driven journey, ushering in a new era of efficiency and decision-making.
1. CUSTOMER
Specsavers - United Kingdom
TITLE
Complete integration of complex data points for BI
Copyrights 息 2013 GrayMatter Software Services Pvt. Ltd.
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CUSTOMER SPEAK
"Red Hat and Pentaho provide a great BI solution for us.
We're delivering enterprise-wide applications, and
continuously improving our ability to use technology to benefit
our business, while reducing and containing costs by using
proven commercial open source software from leaders like Red
Hat and Pentaho. The complex implementations would not
have been possible without the expertise of GrayMatter! For
example, the solution was developed with data from the CSV
feeds transformed to a data warehouse, designed and
developed by GrayMatter, using Pentaho ETL tool Kettle "
2. 2 Copyrights 息 2013 GrayMatter Software Services Pvt. Ltd.
Complete integration of complex data points for BI
"Red Hat and Pentaho provide a great BI solution for us. We're delivering enterprise-
wide applications, and continuously improving our ability to use technology to benefit
our business, while reducing and containing costs by using proven commercial open
source software from leaders like Red Hat and Pentaho."
Specsavers
Company Overview:
Specsavers is a major Spectacles, eye and hear care retailer in the UK, as well as in other
countries in Europe. They have a legacy system called Plato, into which data from all the
stores in a country comes in. They had csv feeds of the data from the source transaction
system.
Key Challenges
They had the onerous task of collating all this data and preparing a commentary /
executive report out of all this data. The csv feeds were translated to Excel and from the
Excel; various analyses were carried out to obtain the requisite reports / charts and
commentaries / observations.
They also had different in-store systems and metrics across multiple acquired businesses
and stores. They had inconsistent strategic metrics across major geographies.
The process of agglomerating and analyzing the data manually through Excel was very
laborious, time consuming and restricted in nature to only the previous months
analysis. Further, they were not able to look at trends across, say, months of some key
performance indicators.
It was not just this mammoth effort of collating and analyzing the data, but also the
limitations provided by the method of analyses that prompted Sepcsavers to look to
Pentaho.
Pentaho Solution
The Pentaho solution was developed on MySQL Enterprise Database on Red Hat
Enterprise Linux OS. Specsavers had used the Pentaho BI Suite Enterprise Edition and it
was one of the worlds largest open source BI deployments. GrayMatter implemented
the solution for Specsavers, with active management participation from Pentaho itself.
The solution was developed with data from the CSV feeds transformed to a data
warehouse, designed and developed by GrayMatter, using Pentaho ETL tool Kettle.
3. 3 Copyrights 息 2013 GrayMatter Software Services Pvt. Ltd.
Subsequently a menu driven user interface of all possible analyses Dashboards was
developed. The same set of dashboards / reports were accessible to the online user and
to the PDF user. The online user would generally be interested in doing the analyses
based on the period of his choice, including trends.
The PDF users objective was to look at a particular months analysis dashboards and it
had the capability of adding and storing narration. There was a feature of printing a PDF
book of the dashboards, along with the Executive summary and narrations entered by
the PDF user. This PDF report can then be sent to the management / required users.
This solution was moved into Production to start with, for the Dutch pack and then
replicated the same BI solution across other countries.
Results
Consistent strategic metrics across countries was achieved, as a result of this
implementation. At the click of a button, users were able to do the various analysis
(view various dashboards) for whatever stores / combinations of stores / regions they
wished to analyze. There was no manual effort required and there were literally no
restrictions to the kind of analyses that could be done.
This helped Specsavers to focus more on strategic decision making based on real-time as
well as historical KPIs.
Specsavers also benefitted by the significantly lower Total Cost of Ownership of Pentaho
than proprietary BI. The other advantages of Pentaho of Enterprise deployability and
breadth of capabilities added to the Pentaho offering from GrayMatter.