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The Lewis Group Banks on Pentaho to Drive Performance Gains

July 19, 2012


Leading UK debt collection agency opts for commercial open source-based reporting and data integration to create resource capacity and improve performance management as the business expands

July 19, 2012, — Delivering the future of business analytics, Pentaho Corporation today announced that leading UK debt collection agency, The Lewis Group, has chosen to implement the integrated Pentaho Business Analytics and Data Integration platform as part of a larger technology refresh designed to support its growth plans. In addition to its exceptional data integration and visualisation tools, Pentaho was chosen for its commercial open source model, which enables the company to manage IT spend and establish a modern, scalable architecture as it rolls out new performance management dashboards. The lewis group engaged Pentaho partner Millersoft to support the implementation.

The lewis group, which handles debt collection for clients in sectors as diverse as finance, retail, insurance, education and central and local government, is currently implementing the data integration, reporting and dashboard capabilities of Pentaho Business Analytics to deliver performance management dashboards to help improve operational efficiency:

  • Key client ‘RAG’ reports- RAG (red / amber / green) reports present information about how the lewis group is performing for its key clients against budget expectations. The reports present KPIs (key performance indicators) that show, for example, how much, how fast and how effectively it is able to collect debt on specific clients’ behalf. Each KPI is presented in a dashboard, with a red, amber or green light, providing an early warning system so that problems can be fixed before they escalate. Currently, RAG reports are live and rolled out to 15 senior managers.
  • Departmental reports – these reports are to be based on aggregated client data and will run at a departmental level (e.g., by office or team). They will measure general business performance.
  • Individual performance scorecards– these will measure individual performance for employees like debt collectors, who have specific targets for collection and quality each month and paid bonuses against those targets.

Millersoft, Pentaho’s top-performing Gold partner in the UK, is delivering and supporting the reporting dashboards, which will be rolled out through the second half of 2012. Millersoft is also handling other aspects of the implementation, including the construction of a new corporate data warehouse that uses an innovative ‘data vault’ approach. This new data warehouse is designed to make it easier for the lewis group to manage operational data from multiple sources as business requirements change and grow. Millersoft is using Pentaho Data Integration to move data from the lewis group’s operational systems into the data vault.

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.