BRAD – an industry first 

Bywaters’ overarching goal is to move from being a process-driven business to a data-driven one that makes decisions with the support of recycling data integrated from several proprietary systems. As a waste and recycling company, Bywaters sees a wider obligation to help society by making companies aware of how to manage these processes more efficiently. It believes that this awareness can only be achieved by analyzing and presenting accurate, meaningful data. To achieve this, Bywaters implemented Pentaho

Business Analytics to create an application called BRAD (Bywaters Reporting Analytics and Dashboards), which is comprised of fixed reports, flexible analytics reports and dashboards. BRAD also uses Pentaho Data Integration (PDI), which enables data to be integrated from all of its different systems into a single warehouse. Data types include operational HR, CRM, Financial and ERP data along with waste incineration data and data from its materials recovery facility, where all the waste is divided.

Key Challenges

 

  • Historically Bywaters had been very process-driven and wanted to change itself and inspire its customers to make data-driven decision in order to achieve significant business gains. To meet current and future needs Bywaters needed an application provider with proven experience and references in advanced analytics, data integration and big data.
  • Bywaters needed to integrate large amounts of disparate data from proprietary systems at its Material Recovery Facility, waste incinerator sites and from its ISYS ERP system and other operational systems
  • Bywaters needed to draw on different data sets and produce a wide spectrum of reports and dashboards to meet the diverse information needs and technical abilities of both employees and customers. Employees need information on customer profitability, top customers by tonnage and expected vs. actual service usage; customers need information on things like recycling volumes and weight, invoicing and carbon footprints.
  • Bywaters’ vision for BRAD’s is to far exceed customers’ baseline needs to meet regulatory compliance. Ultimately it aims to provide high quality information to inspire customers to surpass compliance goals and achieve far greater environmental and economic benefits.

Solution

 

  • Pentaho Data Integration (PDI) to extract, integrate and analyze data from multiple proprietary databases including its ISYS ERP software and data collected at its materials recovery facility and waste incinerator sites. All this data is cleansed and moved into a single data warehouse. Bywaters is also using PDI to prepare its information architecture to integrate big data sources in the near future.
  • Pentaho Business Analytics is then used to build three different types of reports and dashboards from the data warehouse. Each is customized to the specific technical skills and reporting needs of the user.

Value Gained

 

  • Moving to data-driven culture – the insights Pentaho provides means that Bywaters is achieving its strategic goal of having its employees and customers make decisions based on data rather than by following processes.
  • A future-proof enterprise data warehouse – thanks to PDI, Bywaters is ready to integrate any future data types that it or its customers need to support data-driven decision making.
  • BRAD delivered to employees and customers – Bywaters has launched its Pentaho-based BRAD service offering three different categories of reports:  

 

    • Self-service – customers can request pre-defined reports to understand aspects of environmental performance including weights, rates, Co2 usage and compliance. These will soon be delivered through a self-service portal.
    • Interactive – data analysts have access to interactive reporting and the ability to drill down, mine and explore data for advanced decision-making.
    • Dashboards – these are aimed at managers who need a high-level view of key performance indicators.

Why Pentaho?

 

“PDI is probably one of the most powerful tools within modern computing I’ve seen in my career” – “PDI is friggin awesome!” Sasha Korniak 

  • Pentaho Data Integration supports Bywaters’ needs for data validation, cleansing and integration into its enterprise data warehouse today and its future plans to integrate big data sources.
  • Modern, flexible platform built on open standards that will support future technology and data integration.
  • 100% usable functionality that won’t become ‘shelfware’.
  • Reports and dashboards that meet a wide spectrum of end user needs and skills without overlooking critical IT requirements for data governance and integration.

Read the reviewed by Brian McKenna Business Applications Editor of Computerweekly.com 

For more detailed information on BRAD 

Today, I’m working on BRAD Version 2.0 – Beyond Reporting and Analytics Dashboards!