Achieving 100X Faster Insights with Exasol
Apotek 1’s partnership with Exasol has been transformative, helping the company overcome limitations and become a more data-driven enterprise. By providing a high-performance, scalable, and reliable acceleration layer, Exasol Analytics Engine has empowered Apotek 1’s business users with improved data accessibility.
The benefits have spread throughout the business, enabling Apotek 1 to innovate and use data to enhance operational processes such as:
Analyzing promotional campaigns, inventory and space management in more detail than ever.
Closely monitoring and addressing possible stockouts and excess inventory.
Achieving 10-100x faster query performance enabling complex analysis and data-driven decision-making.
In the competitive world of retail pharmacy chains, staying ahead takes more than just stocking shelves. It demands deep insights, agile decision-making, and a proactive approach that anticipates customer needs rather than just reacting to them. For Apotek 1, Norway‘s leading pharmacy chain with over 450 locations, this initiated a data-driven transformation driven in part by Exasol Analytics Engine, a high-performance analytics accelerator that has changed how Apotek 1 uses data.
Norway
3,500+
Pharma
Analytics Acceleration
To begin their transformation, Apotek 1 decided to migrate from an on-premises Oracle database to the Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse in the cloud because the promise of improved performance, scalability, and cost savings made a logical first step. The company also implemented IBM Cognos Analytics as its BI and reporting layer and the migration seemed successful at first, with notable performance gains in the short term.
However, the company soon encountered issues with performance consistency. Query response times varied significantly, ranging from seconds to hours, making it difficult for users to rely on the system for timely insights. Dashboards and reports often timed out or returned errors, severely limiting the scope and depth of analysis. Users were forced to aggregate data and restrict the historical range they could analyze, which had an impact on Apotek 1’s ability to uncover timely insights.
One notable example was the inability to process data from the 6-8 weeks prior to each campaign, which hindered Apotek 1’s capacity to identify patterns, anticipate issues, and resolve stock availability problems proactively. At the same time, their move towards a self-service analytics model, where users could create their own reports and dashboards, became brittle and prone to breaking. This frustrated users, limiting data interactivity, analysis and adoption.
The analytics team spent hours tuning and optimizing the system, with little success. As frustrations grew, it became clear that the technology was impeding Apotek 1’s analytics goals, rather than enabling them.
Determined to find a solution, Lars Sommervold, Head of Analytics at Apotek 1, discovered Exasol Analytics Engine. His team conducted a proof of concept (POC) using Apotek 1’s data and SQL queries on Exasol’s private managed cloud.
The results were impressive. Queries that once took minutes or hours now completed in mere seconds with Exasol Analytics Engine. Moreover, Exasol’s performance was consistent and reliable, a stark contrast to the unpredictable behavior of the previous system. Convinced by the successful POC, Apotek 1 made the decision to migrate Exasol Analytics Engine, hosting the solution on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
Apotek 1’s switch to the Exasol Analytics Engine marked a turning point in their analytics journey, delivering immediate and tangible benefits.
– Apotek 1 Business User
With the ability to leverage self-service analytics using Exasol Analytics Engine, Apotek 1 optimized their marketing campaigns and achieved returns, including:
Exasol has supported Apotek 1 in improving decision-making processes by enabling granular, detailed queries and fostering a data-driven culture. This has led to several benefits:
While Exasol’s fast querying layer transformed user interaction with data, it also revealed inefficiencies in Apotek 1’s ETL processes. The Operational Data Store (ODS) became a bottleneck, with slow ETL delaying data availability. Despite Exasol’s query performance, users often waited for data as loading times exceeded the batch window or in the worst case, never completed.
To address the bottleneck and fully leverage Exasol’s capabilities, Apotek 1 decided to migrate the ODS layer into Exasol using Virtual Schemas, a built-in virtualization feature. This yielded significant benefits, including:
Apotek 1’s adoption of Exasol not only delivered reliable query performance but increased the productivity and efficiency of Lars’s team, including:
With Exasol as the foundation of its analytics infrastructure, Apotek 1 is well-positioned to continue its data-driven transformation. The company plans to further expand its use of advanced analytics, particularly in areas such as operational efficiency, promotion optimization (such as uplift, markdown, cannibalization and push-forward) and inventory optimization. The business will also continue to empower its users with self-service capabilities, fostering a culture of data-driven decision-making at every level of the organisation.
