Users report:

Data Analytics in PracticeSuccessful data projects with Pentaho

Considering the increasing speed of change in business, it is not surprising that data analysis solutions have risen sharply in importance. Companies have to make much wider-reaching decisions in much shorter periods of time. To do this, they need a reliable database that, on the one hand, contains all the organisation‘s information and, on the other, can be evaluated quickly and easily.

Or at least that‘s the theory.

In practice, however, things are often much different: When beginning a new data project, users often wish they could rely on the advice and experience of others. So, instead of writing another theoretical paper on implementing business intelli-gence solutions, we decided to give users a chance to be heard.

In the following chapters, project managers from different companies and institu-tions describe how they came to their data solutions, the problems they encounte-red along the way and how they overcame them.

The projects in question come from both the private and public sector. They also include solutions that have already been implemented and have been in operation for several years. We have done this to ensure that the cases cited are not isolated, unrealistic solutions, but actual applications that have been in effective use for some time.

The solutions are based on the open-source and market-leading Pentaho Business & Big Data platform.

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Our contributors: Public sector

Companies

Michael Becker German Federal Police

Dr. Sonja Kabicher-Fuchs Wiener Wohnen Kunden- service

Rolf Petry Bosch

Helmut Borghorst Deutsche See

Dr. Rene Schult Mercateo

Uwe Geercken Swissport

Christian Repaski eurofunk Kappacher

Alexander Meisinger STIWA

Jan Janke CERN

Devan Manharlal Health Ministry of Mozambique

Contents

1. German Federal Police.....................6

2. CERN................................................10

3. Wiener Wohnen Kundenservice......14

4. Bosch................................................18

5. Deutsche See....................................22

6. Health Ministry of Mozambique.......26

7. STIWA................................................30

8. Mercateo...........................................34

9. eurofunk Kappacher........................38

10. Swissport........................................42

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Michael Becker, Police Superintendent, and Henry Liebrenz, are working in the Centre for Information and Communication Technology in the Federal Police regional headquarters in Potsdam.

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German Federal Police

A data warehouse for the German Federal Police

In recent years, the German Federal Police have

set up a data warehouse that contains all relevant

information for preparing their PES data – a key set

of police statistics. This information comes from a

variety of source systems drawn from the 160

districts, 80 inspectorates, 10 directorates as well

as the national headquarters. This is then proces-

sed and checked for quality assurance in the new

data warehouse. This information is then available

almost instantly for answering queries from

Parliament or the Feder Ministry of the Interior.

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The German Federal Police data project

Prior to the introduction of a data warehouse, the Federal Police Service recorded its PES data in some 72 Excel spreadsheets with each procedure that was statistically relevant to the police having to be entered manually. Each local police station collected the data and sent the Excel spreadsheets to their respective higher-level directorates. These, in turn, re-viewed the information, collated the data and then forwarded it to the national headquar-ters. The national headquarters then reviewed the information and consolidated this on a nationwide level. This resulted in a month-long delay before the data could be made availa-ble to the various official authorities.

Through data warehousing and the use of comprehensive data integration processes, the Federal Police have created a solution with which they can more efficiently handle their many inquiries – an average of three to four a day from Parliament, the national headquar-ters, the Federal Ministry of the Interior, the EU and Frontex. The data is then cleansed and codified for quality assurance reasons, as the data supplied by the different police inspec-torates is always collected differently or is not complete and therefore cannot always be compared with each other. Using their current solution, officials can create analyses with just a few clicks and send them to the requesting department without any delays.

Can you describe how your data project works?

We collect the entire PES data, which contains a total of 20 police responsefields, into a data warehouse. These fields include, among other things, the number of individuals crossing the borders, police search hits, criminal offences, air security, railway police and asylum sta-tistics. To do this, we rely heavily on Pentaho Data Integration (PDI), the Schema Workbench and the BI server supplied by Pentaho.

We are constantly using Pentaho, especially PDI, for numerous developments. We handle tasks such as data integration, data aggregation, data delivery to systems etc. exclusively using PDI. Where previously we had to carry out a lot of tedious and time-consuming work with scripts, we can now complete numerous tasks almost instantly.

Interview with Michael Becker, German Federal PolicePolice Superintendent Michael Becker works in the Centre for Information and Communication Technology in the Federal Police regional headquarters in Potsdam. He is a team leader there with responsibility for developing open-source solutions.

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For example, we use PDI to collect booking data from all time and attendance terminals of the German Federal Police throughout Germany, carry out precalculations and transfer this data to the national headquarters software so we can plan schedules and handle tasks.

We also use it in another way: In order to determine the daily number of officers who must be available for duty, we feed in the nationwide flight plans from the federal airport coordi-nator in Frankfurt am Main into our system each day. This data is then enriched with infor-mation from the respective local airports and forms the basis for calculating the number of officers required to be on duty.

What was special about your project?

We based our approach to setting up our data warehouse on our PES data. The reason for this is that we had to take a slightly different tack than, say, organisations that can fall back on quality-assured data such as that taken from an ERP system. With us, quality assurance has to be carried out partly during our ETL processes, but then also afterwards, because for technical reasons our upstream systems can only perform very marginal quality controls. We‘ve also not followed the traditional reporting approach in terms of data output.

Why do you rely on Pentaho?

We had several other products we tested in the run-up to using Pentaho, but since we deci-ded rather quickly to use PDI as our tool, the rest was pretty obvious. And it has to be said that we‘ve never found a better – and above all more comprehensive – software solution.

A further advantage with Pentaho is that – with appropriate adaptations – you can run the Pentaho Community Edition as a production system and then decide at any time whether you want to stay with it or switch to the Enterprise version. If you decide to use the Enterpri-se Edition, the price-performance ratio is also a decisive factor compared to other establis-hed software solutions. After working with the Community Edition now for two years, we‘re in the process of moving over to the Enterprise Edition.

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© 2007 CERN, for the benefit of the CMS Collaboration

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CERN

The world’s largest research institution bases its business computing on Pentaho

CERN is the biggest research organization in the

world. In 2014, CERN migrated from Business

Objects to Pentaho for data integration, repor-

ting and analytics. CERN bases its entire business

computing on Pentaho and uses all components

of the Pentaho stack: data integration, reporting,

analytics and dashboards. With more than 15,000

users, CERN runs one of the biggest Pentaho im-

plementations worldwide.

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Can you describe how your data project works?

To work at CERN is a unique experience every day. We face very specific challenges in the area of business computing affecting especially the areas of data warehousing, business intelligence and reporting. More than 15,000 potential users are exposed to content served directly or indirectly by Pentaho.

For CERN’s specific needs, we have adapted the Pentaho platform. To keep all content cre-ated by CERN under control we have built an infrastructure around it. The tools we have developed provide enhanced search and scheduling capabilities, add support for delegated management of schemas including approval and environment promotion features as well as an integration with the “git” version control system. These tools help us to operate in an environment with more than 15,000 potential users.

Why did CERN decide to use Pentaho?

We started to use Pentaho in autumn 2014 after a longer BI tool selection process that began with a first evaluation of potential applications in 2012. In the past, we have been relying on in-house developed reporting solutions alongside Business Objects (now owned by SAP). Today, we are using both the business analytics and the data integration products from Pentaho.

Interview with Jan Janke, Deputy Group Leader of Administrative Information Systems at CERNJan Janke is responsible for the entire business computing inf-rastructure of CERN. This includes the internal development in-frastructure, the central data warehouse and the related BI and reporting services as well as the maintenance and development of other major administrative applications.

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Why do you rely on Pentaho?

With the data integration tools (PDI), we were able to stop relying on manually crafted PL/SQL and shell scripts for important ETL processes. Our new central (near real-time) data warehouse relies on PDI as tool of choice for all ETL processes. PDI also helps us to be agno-stic in terms of data sources to read from or write to.

We have chosen Pentaho because it provides us with a powerful data integration tool and brings an appealing solution for our general reporting, data analytics and visualization needs. The fact that most of the tools are available as open source software allows our own developers to easily inspect existing code and integrate our tools with it. Here, the fact that Pentaho is written in Java comes in especially handy as Java or rather the JVM is also our technology of choice for all in-house developments made by CERN’s AIS group.

Despite all the hype made around Big Data, “simple” reporting and data visualization re-main essential for us. Pentaho solutions like CTools or the Report Designer are equally im-portant as for instance the Analyzer which is part of Pentaho’s Enterprise version. All tools have their strong and weak points. We hope that Pentaho together with the community continues to maintain and further evolve them. While PDI is certainly an important corner stone of the Pentaho offering, we hope that strong innovation continues to happen in the business analytics area, too.

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Wiener Wohnen Kundenservice is the largest munici-

pal property management company in Europe. The

company manages around 220,000 community apart-

ments, 47,000 parking spaces and over 5,500 restau-

rants and pubs. Wiener Wohnen Kundenservice relies

on analyses and reports to cover its quality assurance

needs. This ranges from personnel planning and the

evaluation of tenants‘ concerns to professional sys-

tems monitoring. The company also has to produce a

variety of reports for which they use Pentaho as their

platform of choice.

Wiener Wohnen Kundenservice

Monitoring more than 1.8 million customer inquiries each year

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Can you describe how your data project works?

As one of the largest property management companies in Europe, Wiener Wohnen (WW) looks after around half a million tenants, which represents about a quarter of Vienna‘s ur-ban population. The system records over than 1.8 million customer enquiries per year. Mo-nitoring as well as quality assurance, data analysis and reporting are special requirements that we place on our system.

We began our project in 2011. Our goal was to generate pre-defined analyses (reports) on a regular basis and to carry out individual analyses using existing key metrics and dimensi-ons. In doing this, these metrics and dimensions needed correspond to those provided by the old database and also offer additional processed data.

The basis for our work is our call centre data warehouse, which takes data from the telepho-ne system and an operational source system. Using a large number of cubes, key metrics, dimensions and reports, we analyse their performance and derive improvements based on this information.

Interview with Dr. Sonja Kabicher-Fuchs, Wiener Wohnen Kundenservice GmbHProduct Owner/Business Analyst, Dr. Sonja Kabicher-Fuchs is responsible for the professional development and support of the business intelligence solution at Wiener Wohnen Kundenservice.

Pentaho Reporting

Pentaho is the leading open-source platform for data integration, business analysis and data visualisation. It is also used by many companies and public institutions worldwide. By using Pentaho reporting, organisations benefit from:

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Why do you rely on Pentaho?

Pentaho has two major advantages: Firstly, the software is a mature and reliable open-sour-ce product and secondly, it makes it possible to flexibly develop applications further accor-ding to current project requirements.

By using Pentaho we are able to cover our quality assurance needs by using data analysis and reports. This ranges from personnel planning and the evaluation of tenants‘ concerns to professional systems monitoring. In addition to quality management and data analysis, we also generate our reports using Pentaho.

Interactive self-service report creation Web-based reporting for business users Report designer for power users Quick results using in-memory caching Support for common output formats: HTML, Excel, PDF Direct reporting for NoSQL

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Bosch

Global project reporting

Large companies often have the problem that they

have to monitor projects around the world. Bosch

is a good example: This world market leader has to

manage and maintain more than 1,500 customer

projects around the globe. To do this, Bosch uses

a company-wide reporting platform – its global

reporting system. It integrates numerous source

data systems and is not only available to internal

departments and employees, but also allows

suppliers and customers to create and retrieve

reports.

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Interview with Rolf Petry, Bosch Service SolutionsRolf Petry is Group Leader for Global IT Applications and World-wide IT Service Coordination at Bosch Service Solutions in Frank-furt. In this capacity he is also responsible for the company‘s glo-bal reporting system.

Can you describe how your data project works?

At Bosch Service Solutions, we use a global, company-wide reporting system for our custo-mer projects. In doing this, we use data from different source systems (and to a certain de-gree also customer systems) to provide key operational metrics to manage projects, but also key financial metrics for management at all levels. A particular challenge is to merge data from different source systems in such a way that uniform sales and cost reports can be generated.

This global reporting system is linked to a wide variety of systems (including various tele-phone systems, time tracking systems, email systems as well as SAP systems for HR data) and several external customer databases. The metrics include, among other things, inco-ming calls, calls answered, customer terminated calls, turnover, expenses and profits both daily and per project.

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Who works with the reporting portal?

All our customers can access the system and the reporting function. In addition to stan-dardised reports that can be used for all projects, special reports are also available. Using self-service cubes, our employees can perform analyses independently, without needing the assistance of the IT department.

In order to calculate the very different and diverse price models, we use a connection to Excel, so that the finance department can continue to work with their Excel files, which are imported via a PDI process that runs overnight. This enables us to calculate the turnover for all projects. This is very important, because it lets our colleagues create their own price models independently and IT doesn‘t have to get involved as long as users stick to the basic model. Using 10 basic models we can generate hundreds of price model variations.

Why do you rely on Pentaho?

After evaluating a number of systems, we chose Pentaho because it provides us with the greatest range of applications, both in terms of data source connectivity and output capa-bilities. But it was also important to us that the software we chose not be very complicated. It needed to be something that a database expert could easily master in a realistically short period of time.

Other reasons were the fact that it was a standard software package whose basic system could be installed by external personnel, but that could be further developed by our own employees. Also, Pentaho can be opened up to external users (customers) without entailing any security risks. Plus, its cost efficiency and the open-source aspect of it also played a role. Another key factor was that Pentaho has already been introduced into other areas of the company, so this allowed us to exploit existing synergies such as prior experience with report creation, etc.

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Deutsche See

Pentaho in the food industry

Deutsche See is the German market leader for

fish and seafood. For years the company has been

working with a comprehensive sales management

system based on Pentaho. The solution provides

management and sales with access to sales data

and other key sales metrics. The reports can also

be accessed from mobile devices while on the go

and can be flexibly compiled into individual re-

ports. Currently, the portal contains more than

100 reports, which will gradually be extended and

expanded.

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Can you describe how your data project works?

At Deutsche See, Pentaho is used by more than 300 users in the most diverse areas of the company: purchasing, controlling, marketing, production, sales, logistics and manage-ment. Using Pentaho, we store all sales-relevant data such as customers, receipts and items along with their quantities and sales turnover in 20 cubes and 300 dimensions and KPIs.

The sales portal includes various standard reports, predefined individual analyses and pre-parations for customer visits for the sales team. The portal displays data according to dif-ferent topics, such as customers, companies, sales, services, markets etc. So, for example, a Deutsche See customer advisor can call up data for each customer from anywhere in the world. All customer-related data such as contact partners, contact details, turnover genera-ted or purchased products is stored in the system. This even includes the current weather at the customer‘s premises. Currently, 100 reports have been created and more are planned for the future. Employees can even create their own reports.

Interview with Helmut Borghorst, Deutsche SeeHelmut Borghorst is Head of Internal Sales and Software Develop-ment at Deutsche See. In addition to several proprietary develop-ments in the company‘s merchandise management, he also looks after the company‘s reporting platform.

Pentaho Business Analytics

Pentaho Business Analytics is a powerful application for data analysis. It is also used by many companies and public institutions worldwide. With Pentaho Business Analytics, organisations benefit from:

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Why do you rely on Pentaho?

Since Pentaho is open source, the first thing that comes to mind is the lack of licensing fees. But of course, that‘s not everything: Pentaho is a very powerful tool that offers a huge amount of data and its corresponding graphical representations. Plus, further development is progressing very quickly and support can easily be purchased as needed.

Previously, we worked with Excel spreadsheets and PDF reports, but at some point we reali-sed we needed a more flexible solution. We then introduced Pentaho Reports and Pentaho Analyser, which we can use to automatically send out reports. But just sending out reports wasn‘t enough. This is why we decided to introduce Pentaho CTools so that we could set up a web-based reporting portal.

The most important things the project has achieved are greater flexibility and the elimina-tion of the many different individually produced Excel spreadsheets we used to have. With Pentaho, our employees have a central access point and work area and can also access a uniform database. Our primary reasons for introducing Pentaho were its higher flexibility and lower costs. A comparable solution from commercial vendors would have been many times more expensive to implement.

Complete platform for data access, integration and evaluation that includes Big Data sources such as Hadoop and NoSQL

Interactive visual analysis with drill-through, lasso filtering, zooming, heat raster, geo-maps, sunbursts and highlighting of attributes for greater insights

Clear visualisation, interactive reporting, ad-hoc analyses and customised dashboards

Complete range of business analytics paired with flexible data integration

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Quelle: Jhpiego

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Health Ministry of Mozambique

Pentaho helps to save lives

Analyzing health data to provide better health

services is crucial for governments, especially in

developing countries. The Ministry of Health uses

Pentaho to integrate, analyze and visualize health

data from different sources to provide better he-

alth care services to the population.

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Interview with Devan Manharlal, Health Ministry of MozambiqueDevan Manharlal is Health Information Systems Senior Specialist and has implemented the Integrated Human Resource Informati-on System of Mozambique.

Can you describe how your data project works?

Mozambique runs esipSAUDE, the Integrated Human Resource Information System to im-prove the country’s health care services. Since 2012, we use Pentaho to integrate data from various health information systems and other data sources to provide health services and prevention programs for the country.

Before that, data was isolated and could not be combined to get information about the allocation of health workers and resources. We integrate the data using Pentaho Data Inte-gration and present it on the project’s website using CDE dashboards.

Why do you rely on Pentaho?

With Pentaho, we were able to improve the management of health data in Mozambique. The availability of open source data integration and analytics tools makes it easy to provide important services within the limited budget of a developing country.

We use Pentaho not only to visualize the data that our managers need but also to make this data available for them. We created „actionable data“ that they can explore and analyze themselves to take decisions and actions. Pentaho made it all very easy.

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Pentaho is the solution for many problems we had with data integration and system inte-roperability as data is integrated from many different sources. Some of our systems had limitations in terms of reports and data access. With Pentaho we were able to solve these problems.

Also, as a developing country, we face budget problems when introducing commercial soft-ware. Using open source solutions like Pentaho we can use all the money for the implemen-tation and the training of the staff.

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STIWA

Pentaho: The foundation for production facility analysis software

When production plants are commissioned or re-

quire maintenance, it is imperative that each of

the plant‘s components be able to be monitored

and evaluated. The analysis software from STI-

WA produces seamless, end-to-end production

processes – from an outage event through to the

ERP system. In doing this, machine, product and

process information is recorded, linked, visualised

and analysed.

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Can you describe how your data project works?

We are producers of standardised software products in discrete production as well as being system integrators in our customers‘ global production. With our software products, we create continuity in production from outage events through to the ERP system, with the focus being on the acquisition, linking, visualisation and analysis of machine, product and process information.

And as the basis for our analysis tool, AMS Analysis-CI, we use Pentaho. Using AMS Analy-sis-CI, our customers are able to increase their production, because they can achieve a 25% reduction in commissioning time for new plants and increase their overall efficiency (OEE) on average by 15%.

The analysis is based on our AMS ZPoint-CI control station. Both HMI/SCADA and MES featu-res are integrated into the system performance. The focus here is on system operation and the seamless, automated acquisition of machine, process and product data from STIWA and non-STIWA systems.

Interview with Alexander Meisinger, STIWAAlexander Meisinger heads up the software sales department for the high-performance automation specialist STIWA Group at their Hagenberg office in Austria.

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Why do you rely on Pentaho?

We‘ve found that we can only achieve our goals – such as drilling down to the component level of production lines – with Pentaho. Pentaho is easily extensible and provides good support for ad-hoc analyses using the Pentaho Analyser. And not least of all, we also really liked Mondrian‘s data abstraction layer a lot.

The interactive dashboards are based on the Pentaho Analyser. This makes it possible to take the user by the hand and delve deeper and deeper into the analyses to find out the cause of a problem. One starting point is the key metric OEE (overall equipment effective-ness), which is then reviewed in ever-greater detail to further narrow down the causes of the problem. This makes it easier for the plant manager to decide whether he needs to call in maintenance, process engineering or logistics to solve the problem.

Since the amount of data in the automotive sector is constantly growing and we are obliged to retain data for at least 15 years, we‘ve begun using an additional Pentaho component, Mondrian, which allows us to analyse even very large volumes of data.

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Mercateo

18 million-item E-commerce portal

Mercateo is an online retailer procurement plat-

form. This E-commerce portal contains over 18

million articles for 1.25 million business custo-

mers in eleven European countries. Mercateo has

an extremely high data growth rate, which is why

the company decided several years ago to move to

a centralised database.

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Can you describe how your data project works?

Our data grows by about 5 GB a day and totals several terabytes. The data comes from six different sources: SAP data, Oracle order data, Apache logs, data from our own logs, call centre communication data that is fed into an MS SQL server and external data from the FTP server. We used Cognos for analyses as well as various in-house analysis systems.

Interview with Dr. Rene Schult, MercateoDr. Rene Schult is head of the BI team and responsible for Merca-teo‘s data projects. A few years ago, he introduced Pentaho as the central analysis platform for the company.

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What challenges did you face before starting the project?

Apart from the fact that Cognos was very expensive, the proliferation of analysis tools was an increasing problem. There were numerous ad-hoc analyses created on demand by de-velopers and numerous Excel spreadsheets that users had created themselves because the-re was a lack of interfaces to the source systems.

We therefore decided to introduce a central database with Pentaho as our tool of choice with all data being fed into the PostgreSQL database we set up just for this purpose. Also, the XML servers were connected via RMI interfaces and our own, in-house Java programs with the logs and databases being read via Python scripts.

How did the project implementation go?

There were various problems during the implementation, both on the user side and techni-cally. Initially, users were not at all enthusiastic about the new solution, which was compa-red very critically with our much-loved legacy systems. However, there was a much more profound problem behind this: Most users didn‘t understand much of the data at all. So to begin with, they had to be trained in understanding data: That is, „What is being displayed here to me?“, „What kind of data do I really want?“, „Which metrics do I need to know?“

We also had to take some drastic steps to gain greater acceptance: The decision was made to turn the existing systems off there and then. There was a lot of potential for conflict, but once the users got to grips with the new application, acceptance noticeably increased. Because of this potential for conflict, I recommended that we get in direct contact with the users and encourage them to actively engage with the new application.

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eurofunk Kappacher

Pentaho: Supporting the Police and Fire Services

eurofunk is a family-owned company that has

been in business for about 50 years. It speciali-

ses in security control centres for public sector

security and safety organisations (police service,

fire brigade, rescue services) and large indust-

rial companies including airports. eurofunk is a

full-service supplier of security control stations

(furniture, hardware and software) and has its own

development and production facilities to support

such complex projects. In 2015, the company re-

developed its analysis and reporting tool, using

Pentaho as its basis.

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Interview with Christian Repaski, eurofunk KappacherChristian Repaski is Product Manager at eurofunk Kappacherand is responsible for the company‘s analysis software.

Can you describe your project for us? The fire brigade, police or rescue services control centres must monitor the statutory res-ponse times for emergency calls (if an emergency call is received, only a certain period of time may elapse before the appropriate service arrives on site. This depends on the country, but about seven to twelve minutes is typical).

Relevant questions here are: How long does it take for a call to be answered by a control centre? How much time elapsed between receiving the call and the response? Which ser-vices were involved? For how many calls was it not possible to respond within the mandated reaction time? These analyses are carried out by our software. The control centres then use this data to derive measures for promoting greater optimisation, such as more efficient planning of operational personnel or offices.

Command and control systems contain very sensitive data, which is why these are closed systems. After completion of a callout, the associated data is transferred to an administra-tion system where it is processed and supplemented with additional information. This is then loaded into the data warehouse using the data integration server. Our customers have access to this database, which is used by several thousand users.

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Why do you rely on Pentaho?

We use Pentaho as an OEM solution for all business intelligence-related tasks for our soft-ware. Using Pentaho we provide the corresponding data cubes and/or measures and di-mensions by drawing from this diverse data. Using the Pentaho user interfaces in our applications, our customers can create ad-hoc queries without having to be SQL experts themselves. They can cumulatively analyse quality and performance metrics over a certain period of time or choose to list only the master data.

Pentaho covers the very important topics of permissions management integration and the integration of geographic data: For instance, it is not only possible to integrate maps ob-tained from Google, but our customers can also integrate their own map data (which often contains much more information than Google Maps). Plus, Pentaho can be used to map the extensive permissions within individual control centres (usually several control centres are networked with each other, but access the same system).

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Swissport

Data integration processes simplified

Swissport is the world‘s largest service company

for airports and airlines. The company employs

61,000 people, manages more than 3.9 million

flights with 229 million passengers per year, hand-

ling in the process 4.1 million tonnes of freight.

Swissport has reorganised its data integration

processes for processing its corporate data. This

means that, among other things, they can analyse

their SAP data much faster.

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Can you describe how your data project works? At Swissport we analyse practically all operational systems – flights, services and other areas. This also includes complex headcount analyses such as employee absences. Our clearing in SAP for the Zurich office is based on data processed with Pentaho (an audited process) and is also how we supply our customers with data. And we feed various internal systems with this information for activities such as flight and personnel planning, budge-ting, and for calculating KPIs in Jedox.

We started a new project recently, which involves carrying out worldwide invoicing in SAP with Pentaho handling the data processing. Thus this project places clearing in a corpora-te-wide/global context. In addition, we have chosen an approach in which we have separate out the business logic from the ETL jobs. The business rules are created and maintained externally, so the IT (code/processes) and the business rules are maintained separately.

We use the business rules engine to prepare the data (clearing handled in SAP) for the ser-vices we provide to our customers (the airlines) at the airport. The intention behind keeping the business rules separated is to make it possible for a single IT data handling process to run for all Swissport business units at various airports, while at the same time taking into account the differences between customer contracts and the various Swissport locations.

Interview with Uwe Geercken, SwissportUwe Geercken is responsible for data processing and reporting at Swissport. He also looks after the company‘s interfaces and pro-ject management. He has been setting up data integration proces-ses, reports and analyses using Pentaho for the best part of nine years.

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What advantage does the business rules engine offer?

The business rules engine is a software solution for executing business rules. For example, a business rule could be „If the customer is 25 years old and lives in Frankfurt, then create a promotional item“ – that is, calculate a discount. The business rules are maintained in an application and are not embedded in any software or IT processes. This makes the IT pro-cesses leaner, more clearly structured and thus more agile while at the same time improving the quality. By keeping the business rules separate, it‘s possible to transfer the responsibi-lity for these rules to the business experts – that is, someone from operations who knows the rules or is responsible for them or who defined them in a contract with the customer.

If you use Pentaho, you can download the business rules engine as a plugin for the data integration component of the software, Pentaho Data Integration. It‘s available for free from Github. Apart from using the business rules with Pentaho, you can also use the business rules engine for maintaining rules in other projects. This means the tool can be used univer-sally without having to maintain the business logic in different systems. Having centralised logic is also an important plus in terms of quality because it increases the efficiency of bu-siness processes.

Who else uses the plugin besides Swissport?

Another large-scale user of the rules engine is the company Veriship. They analyse the quali-ty (e.g. punctuality) and costs of (large) shipments for customers in America such as letters, parcels and the like. Based on these analyses, they recover costs and carry out contract revisions for the customer. This means that the customer isn‘t required to do anything and benefits from repayments and better contracts if shipments have not been completed in accordance with the terms and conditions.

Why do you rely on Pentaho?

The answer is simple: Pentaho is flexible, versatile and reliable. The solution can be easily combined with other systems and techniques, because it is open source. And the data inte-gration component is very well developed and has been used by dozens of companies for years.

Within the Pentaho partner network, it- novum also occupies a prominent role: We are one of the top 3 partners in Europe and, as a Pentaho Authorised Training Partner, the only authorised training provider in the German-speaking market.

With over six years of implementing Pentaho’s solutions, it-novum is one of our most experienced partners in Europe. They combine excellent technology skills with a deep understanding of business processes, leveraging the power of Pentaho’s big data and business ana-lytics capabilities.

Paul Scholey, Pentaho/ Vice President EMEA & APAC

As a Jedox Platinum Certified Partner, it-novum develops solutions for data warehousing, analysis, reporting and planning.

Together with its partner Cloudera, it- novum develops analytical applications based on Hadoop and Pentaho.

Our Partners

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Why you should speak with it-novum... We are leveraging these business intelligence and big data benefits to businesses:

▶ 360-degree view of your customers ▶ Specialist departments evaluate Big Data data themselves thanks to self-service analytics ▶ Identification of new revenue sources through intelligent use of company data ▶ Cost savings through the use of a data warehouse ▶ Avoiding the time-consuming and error-prone Excel mess

If you want to use these benefits in your business, we should get to know each other!

it-novum offers extensive services for your big data analytics project:

▶ Data engineering ▶ Implementation of data warehouses and data lakes ▶ Pentaho/SAP Connector for processing SAP data ▶ Pentaho/HVA Connector for video stream analytics ▶ Predictive analytics and machine learning ▶ Dashboards and data visualization ▶ Embedded analytics

Leading in Business Open Source solutions and consulting

it-novum is the leading IT consultancy for open source based business solutions in the German- speaking market. We operate from our main office in Fulda and branch offices in Dusseldorf, Dortmund, Vienna and Zurich to serve medium and large enterprises as well as the public sector.

As Hitachi Vantara Preferred Partner for Big Data Insights and IoT we are experts in using Pentaho. With our expertise in consulting, training and support we help companies to generate insights from their data and to make their data-driven projects successful

Your contact person for Business Intelligence and Big Data: Stefan Müller Director Big Data Analytics stefan.mueller@it-novum.com +49 (0) 661 103 942

it-novum GmbH Germany Headquarters Fulda: Edelzeller Straße 44 ● 36043 Fulda ● Tel. +49 (0) 661 103 333 Branches in: Düsseldorf and Dortmund it-novum Branch Austria Ausstellungsstraße 50 / Zugang C ● 1020 Vienna ● Tel. +43 1 205 774 1041 it-novum Branch Switzerland Hotelstrasse 1 ● 8058 Zurich ● Tel. +41 (0) 44 567 62 07