Delta Dental of Virginia Adopts Pentaho as Business Intelligence Standard

Incorporating BI Into Website Software Delivers Reporting Capabilities to over 4,000 Group Administrators Across Virginia

May 25, 2011, — agile business intelligence (BI), today announced that Delta Dental of Virginia (DDVA) has adopted Pentaho as its BI standard. Since first licensing Pentaho four years ago, DDVA has grown its BI implementation significantly and now utilizes four products included within the Pentaho BI Suite Enterprise Edition. In the process, the company has become a truly data-driven organization, equipped to make faster, more informed business decisions.

With more than 45 years of experience in providing dental benefits to the state of Virginia, DDVA has leveraged its domain expertise to create sophisticated systems that effortlessly administer coverage, provide easy-to-use benefits for enrollees, and offer member groups cost-efficient dental benefit plans. Over the past four years, DDVA has made these systems smarter by incorporating the Pentaho BI Suite into its DCS2000® claims processing system, its customer-facing website, and has adopted Pentaho as its internal BI platform, too.

DDVA leverages the Pentaho BI Suite in the following ways:

Pentaho BI Platform is now a part of the company's DCS2000 claims processing system so that its 4,000+ group administrators gain better visibility into their data. DCS2000 has been so successful that it has been adopted by four additional Delta Dental member companies, which either license the software from DDVA or access it as a SaaS service.

Pentaho Reporting is incorporated into the company's website software, a key component of DDVA customer service. Much more than a marketing tool, the DDVA website integrates tightly with the claims processing system so that people can check the status of their claims and DDVA administrators can pull reports from the site. This interactive site is refreshed monthly with new data and has been so successful that other Delta Dental member companies have asked DDVA's software development team to write their web software, too.

Pentaho Dashboards are essential to the company's internal reporting and decision-making platform. Pentaho is used to create management reports in the company's Metric Analytic and Research System (MAARS) tool to provide insight into fraudulent behavior, from which dashboards are created for compensation compliance.

Pentaho Analysis provides self-service analytics for DDVA's non-technical business users, so that individuals from multiple departments can extract answers, trends and insight from their data without ever having to contact IT.

Pentaho Data Integration (PDI) is leveraged for batch processing chores, such as billing and invoicing, which run once a week. DDVA replaced a propriety ETL solution with Pentaho Data Integration, allowing them to capture and integrate data from disparate sources

Pentaho Support Services came on site at DDVA to guide their business users on how best to use their tools and applications that DDVA has developed for them. "Pentaho support is as good as its software," said John Sheffield, Director of Software Development at Delta Dental of Virginia. "We haven't needed it a lot, but when we did need it, we got it."

"Pentaho has precipitated a cultural shift at Delta Dental of Virginia toward a knowledge worker paradigm," said Sheffield. "Once we had a BI platform that everyone could use and people understood its capabilities, they were transformed into knowledge workers who can look to data to answer their questions. As a result, people rely on data, not anecdotes to drive the business."

"In adopting Pentaho as its BI standard, Delta Dental of Virginia has capitalized on the Pentaho BI platform and open source pricing to drive BI across the organization so that more departments and individuals can profit from BI," said Ian Fyfe, chief technology evangelist, Pentaho Corporation. "As a result, Delta Dental of Virginia is benefiting across the board from its ability to use data to make more informed decisions."

Visit Pentaho.com to read the full story of How Delta Dental of Virginia uses Pentaho to drive its business.

About Delta Dental of Virginia
Delta Dental of Virginia, headquartered in Roanoke, was created in 1964 as a not-for-profit service corporation. Delta Dental provides employee dental benefits through a variety of managed fee-for-service and PPO plans covering more than 1.6 million enrollees in more than 3,600 groups. Delta Dental of Virginia is a member company of the Delta Dental Plans Association, the nation's largest, most experienced dental benefits carrier providing dental coverage to more than 54 million people in more than 93,000 groups across the nation.

About Pentaho, a Hitachi Group company
Pentaho, a Hitachi Group company, is a leading data integration and business analytics company with an enterprise-class, open source-based platform for diverse big data deployments. Pentaho's unified data integration and analytics platform is comprehensive, completely embeddable and delivers governed data to power any analytics in any environment. Pentaho's mission is to help organizations across multiple industries harness the value from all their data, including big data and IoT, enabling them to find new revenue streams, operate more efficiently, deliver outstanding service and minimize risk. Pentaho has over 15,000 product deployments and 1,500 commercial customers today including ABN-AMRO Clearing, BT, EMC, NASDAQ and Sears Holdings Corporation. For more information visit www.pentaho.com.