Introduction
Progressive Leasing is the largest and longest-tenured virtual lease-to-own provider in the United States, helping millions of customers access affordable purchase options while supporting more than 27,000 retail partners. As a deeply data-driven organization, Progressive relies on real-time insight to guide every aspect of the customer experience. To keep pace with rapidly growing data volumes and business demand, the company partnered with WhereScape and HVR to modernize and automate its data infrastructure.
Pre-WhereScape Challenges
- Exploding data volumes: Data volumes had increased 20x, overwhelming existing BI processes.
- ETL development bottlenecks: Manual coding slowed delivery of new analytics and reports.
- Limited BI capacity: A small BI team struggled to meet growing business demand.
- Delayed insight: Data delivery cycles stretched from minutes to days.
Why WhereScape?
Progressive Leasing needed a solution that could eliminate manual ETL development, accelerate data warehouse delivery and support real-time analytics. WhereScape RED provided automated development, deployment and operation of data warehouse solutions, while integrating seamlessly with Microsoft SQL Server. Combined with HVR (now part of Fivetran), the platform enabled real-time replication without placing additional load on transactional systems.
“WhereScape and HVR let us focus more on solving business problems than technical challenges.”
– Rajeev Lahoty, Senior Director, Business Intelligence & Analytics, Progressive Leasing
The Solution
Automated Warehouse Development
WhereScape RED automated nearly all aspects of data warehouse development, including ETL, dimensional modelling and deployment.
Rapid Proof of Concept
During evaluation, the Progressive Leasing team used WhereScape to build an entire data warehouse in less than one hour: demonstrating dramatic gains in productivity.
Real-Time Data Replication
HVR was introduced to replicate data from transactional systems into the data warehouse in real time with minimal effort and system impact.
Modern, Agile Data Architecture
Progressive now uses an operational data store powered by HVR as the primary source for its data warehouse, improving agility while protecting source systems.
“We used WhereScape RED to build a new data warehouse from scratch using 20 source tables in just a few hours.”
– Rajeev Lahoty, Senior Director, Business Intelligence & Analytics, Progressive Leasing
Results
🚀 Real-Time Data Delivery
- Data replication completed in minutes instead of days.
- 40 tables replicated in real time in under 30 minutes.
- Faster access to operational insight across the business.
🚀 Massive Productivity Gains
- At least 90% of data warehouse effort automated.
- BI engineers spend less time coding and more time delivering insight.
- Faster turnaround on business requests.
🚀 Reduced Operational Impact
- Minimal load on transactional systems.
- Operational data store shields production environments.
- Improved reliability and performance.
🚀 Business Agility at Scale
- BI team keeps pace with business demand.
- Faster experimentation with data lakes and analytics use cases.
- Confident, data-driven decision making across the organization.
“Keeping up with business demands has never been easier and for the first time in my career of 20 years, I feel I can sprint with the business and not fall behind.”
– Rajeev Lahoty, Senior Director, Business Intelligence & Analytics, Progressive Leasing
A Culture Built on Data
At Progressive Leasing, data is embedded in every customer interaction – from mobile app usage to lease servicing. The ability to deliver trusted, real-time analytics ensures teams at every level can act with confidence.
Best-of-Breed Integration
Rather than relying on a single-vendor approach, Progressive selected a best-of-breed combination of WhereScape and HVR. Together, they simplified complex data integration while delivering performance and scalability.
Future-Proofing the Platform
Progressive is actively expanding its architecture to include data lakes and new analytics use cases. HVR enables rapid ingestion of change data, while WhereScape accelerates downstream warehouse and data mart development.
From Bottleneck to Business Enabler
What was once a constraint is now a competitive advantage. With automation handling repetitive tasks, the BI team is free to focus on delivering value and supporting growth.