Challenge

• Fuel international growth in highly competitive markets by discovering ways to improve customer services, unlock efficiencies, and lift profitability.

Solution

• Integrate and analyze financial, customer, and HR data from multiple service lines and business locations and deliver reports to key stakeholders.

Outcome

• Enables smarter, data-driven decision making that helps the company to boost financial and operational performance and leap ahead of the competition.

Challenge

For more than 60 years, Grupo EULEN has been a leading provider of outsourced business services. Today, the company offers four main service lines: facilities services and management, security, social and health services, and HR solutions. With 7,000 clients, Grupo EULEN achieved turnover of more than EUR 1.7 billion in 2023, and operates in 11 countries worldwide, including Spain, Portugal, Chile, Mexico, and the United States among others.

Ricardo Mardomingo, Chief Information Officer, Grupo EULEN, explains: “We are growing quickly, both in our home market of Spain and overseas. For example, our latest acquisition enabled us to expand into delivering cleaning services in the United States. But in each of our service lines, we are competing against long-established multinational companies—so we need to remain as agile as possible to thrive.”

To improve financial performance, Grupo EULEN created the Business Intelligence Competence Center, an internal body to oversee data management and analytics projects. The aim of the Business Intelligence Competence Center team is to deliver data-driven insights that will help the company to evolve its offerings, unlock efficiencies, reduce costs, and identify new opportunities for growth.

However, unlocking the value of its data proved challenging for Group EULEN, as Ricardo Mardomingo notes: “In the past, we relied on limited legacy tools to create query-based reports. Similarly, pulling data from the heterogenous systems used by different areas and business models was difficult. We wanted more sophisticated data integration and analytics solutions to deliver more value to the wider business and to reduce time-to-insight.”

Solution

To help identify the right tools for more effective data management and analysis, Grupo EULEN engaged business intelligence specialists innovAhead. After a technical analysis of its requirements with innovAhead, Grupo EULEN decided to use the Pentaho+ Platform to redesign its data integration and reporting workflows—initially for its core operations in Spain, before implementing the new business intelligence model globally.

Ricardo Mardomingo explains: “We had previously purchased Pentaho licenses, but the solution remained underutilized until innovAhead showed us its true potential. We were impressed by the solution roadmap, with new functionality released regularly, and by the data integration capabilities of Pentaho. We therefore opted to upgrade and enhance our deployment of Pentaho to make the most of our existing investment.”

Using Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics, Grupo EULEN extracts financial, HR, and customer transaction data from its core business systems, before running transformation jobs and loading the formatted data into a PostgreSQL database. The company runs the extract, transform and load (ETL) jobs overnight on a daily or weekly cadence, helping to prevent any negative impact on the performance of its production systems.

Grupo EULEN then harnesses Pentaho’s analytics tools to create OLAP cubes and in-depth reports tracking key performance indicators (KPIs), before distributing them to business stakeholders. For example, as a future approach, the company could collect templates containing financial data from its international businesses, before merging them with information from Spain to form a consolidated picture of global performance.

Juan Carlos Garcia, Leader of the Business Intelligence Team, InnovAhead, adds: “Pentaho forms a crucial component in EULEN’s corporate business intelligence strategy. We have built a rich library of reports that we are continuously updating to gain a deeper understanding of EULEN’s business.”

Outcome

With Pentaho, Grupo EULEN has the advanced data integration and analytics tools needed to guide smarter decisions that will help to fuel business growth. Around 1,000 employees access information from Pentaho—including “Power Users” in the Business Intelligence Competence Center who are responsible for preparing analysis and drilling down into the data, and business executives who regularly receive reports.

Juan Carlos Garcia explains: “With Pentaho, we have greatly improved the time-to-insight, with users now able to access the data they need to track key business metrics near-instantly. Grupo EULEN is becoming a more agile company, as we can quickly pull information on the performance of EULEN’s different service lines and products, identify issues, and take proactive steps to reduce costs or optimize efficiency, and then measure the results.”

For example, Grupo EULEN recently discovered that its average time to collect customer payments was becoming too long. The company therefore redesigned its accounts receivable processes and has successfully reduced average payment collection periods, helping to improving cashflow.

Ricardo Mardomingo continues: “Pentaho offers excellent data integration and analytics capabilities without high licensing costs. When we looked at other data management solutions, we found complex pricing models and monthly fees. With Pentaho, we get the ideal combination of great functionality and cost-efficiency.”

Moving forward, Grupo EULEN will continue to work with innovAhead and Pentaho to enhance its business intelligence capabilities. Ricardo Mardomingo concludes: “We are interested in exploring other reference cases for Pentaho, to see how other clients are using the platform. In the next 12 months, we will complete another upgrade to access the latest-and-greatest functionality to support our data analysis strategy for 2025 and beyond.”