Sheetz has deployed Pentaho Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition and Teradata Data Mart Appliance from Pentaho Corp., a commerical open source alternative for business intelligence. The application serves users across multiple departments, providing self-service access to corporate data to drive company performance, EarthTimes reported.
Altoona-Penn.- based Sheetz Inc. operates 350 c-stores across Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Maryland, Virginia, Ohio and North Carolina.
The project is being called “Sharehouz,” and it was created to support the c-store chain’s continued growth by providing visibility into store-level sales data, integrated with other operational information.
All corporate departments are using the information, which includes standardized reports. The Sharehouz application also allows business users to create their own ad hoc reports to answer key business questions at any level of detail across three terabytes of data stored in the Teradata Data Mart Appliance, Earth Times reported.
The Pentaho application is running on a Sun server with the Solaris operating system and the Tomcat application server. Sheetz chose to use Pentaho based on its fit with Sheetz’s technical requirements, its low cost of ownership compared to traditional business intelligence alternatives and its professional support.
“The Pentaho suite allows our technology and business users to get the data they need to perform analysis and standard reporting,” said James Wenner, director of information technology at Sheetz. “In phase one of our project, we are giving business users ad hoc capabilities for enterprise data. Pentaho has provided us with the support we needed to install and implement quickly.”