National Memorial Maintains Operational Excellence

The organization needed a business tool to create reports and provide in-depth analysis and visualization. For this nonprofit organization, cost was also an important factor in selecting a business analytics tool.

The Solution: End-to-End Data Integration and Business Analytics Platform

Pentaho Business Analytics was selected because it met the Memorial's requirements. They had been looking for an end-to-end business analytics platform that included data integration to facilitate Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) from systems including retail, e-commerce, visitor pass reservation and admissions screening into a data warehouse. The organization also sought analysis and reporting capabilities.

Pentaho connects to a data warehouse using MySQL to process ETL nightly and populate data into internal reports. The system is installed on a virtual server that runs the Linux operating system.

The Outcome: Maximize Revenues and Maintain Operational Excellence

Maximize revenues – Pentaho automatically loads data overnight from operations into the data warehouse to generate daily operations reports. With this insight, the organization can better manage daily operations, such as security allocation and museum ticketing.

Maintain compliance – The Memorial has deployed Pentaho alerts to automatically inform security personnel whenever the crowd starts to reach maximum capacity. This ensures that the Memorial is always in compliance since it accommodates up to 1,500 visitors at any time.

Power online merchandise sales – Supporters and visitors are now able to make purchases of keepsakes and mementos online, at the 9/11 Memorial preview site or at the 9/11 Memorial visitor center.

Achieve management buy-in – Management has become more reliant on data analysis and is asking for Pentaho to do even more.

Rely on professional services – Pentaho consultants came on site to help deploy the initial solution in just a few days, and the analytics team has also participated in both onsite and online training from Pentaho.

Accomplish operational excellence – Pentaho streamlined the two- or three-day task of piecing together the operations report; the report is now created automatically, available at the click of a mouse, and easily viewed on one screen.