Case Study: Rafter achieves near-real-time analytics and operational agility with Looker

Rafter nimbly outpaces its competitors by using flexible, real-time analytics in Looker

Rafter is a cloud platform that powers college textbook rentals and storefronts for over 300 schools and major marketplaces. Facing a fiercely competitive market, the company was hampered by a nightly ETL that took up to 10 hours, Excel and legacy tools that couldn’t scale, and widespread dependence on analysts for routine queries—limiting finance, inventory, pricing, marketing, and operations from making timely decisions.

Rafter deployed Looker on a Pivotal Greenplum MPP warehouse and used LookML to create consistent, reusable metrics and self‑service, near‑real‑time dashboards. The change delivered fast queries and drilldowns, let teams act hourly on pricing and marketing, automated inventory liquidation, improved fraud detection and customer service, and cut finance close time from a month to three days—reducing costs and boosting revenues and customer satisfaction.

Rafter

Dheeraj Kumar

Director of Data Warehouse Operations