Most of you will know renowed Open Source applications, like Joomla and WordPress for Content Management. Some applications however, are less familiar, but nothing less useful or powerful. As consultant specialized in planning and forecasting, I use a lot of Open Source software with Operations Research functionality, that can be used for advanced decision making processes. With it, I help organizations make better decisions that lead to higher revenues.

Many projects in my line of business start off with data gathering. Whilst documents and spreadsheets load easily into OpenOffice for basic review, anything more sophisticated would require date to be loaded in a structured database. Data extraction, transformation and loading is therefore required, and one of the applications you can use for that is Pentaho’s Kettle (http://kettle.pentaho.org/). Kettle was once a seperate project, but it became a part of the Business Intelligence project Pentaho.

Once loaded in a structured database, you can use Pentaho’s analysis modules to work your way through the data, but for more powerful statistical analysis you can turn to the R-project (http://www.r-project.org/). R is a powerful platform for statistical computing. (more…)