Customer Story
Spread Group
Spread Group boosts reporting speed by 164× with Exasol, saving six figures annually, improving decisions, and eliminating performance tuning.
Spread Group & Exasol: Six-Figure Annual Savings
Spread Group Accelerates Reporting by 164x and Eliminates Performance Tuning
Executive Summary
Spread Group is a globally operating print-on-demand provider of customized fashion and lifestyle products. Its BI landscape, originally based on open-source technologies such as MySQL and Pentaho, could no longer keep up with the company’s growing e-commerce demands. By switching to Exasol as the data warehouse and Strategy as the reporting front end, key dashboards and reports were generated and delivered up to 164 times faster. The improved data availability and performance of the Exasol–Strategy stack led to six-figure annual savings in commissions, enhanced data-driven decision-making, and made manual performance tuning a thing of the past.
Key figures at a glance:
164x faster delivery of specific reports
Six-figure annual savings in commissions
More reliable, data-driven decisions through high data availability
Elimination of manual performance tuning
Company Profile
Founded in 2002 as “Spreadshirt”, Spread Group is one of the world’s largest print-on-demand companies, generating annual revenues of nearly €169 million (2023). With around 1,000 employees and four production sites in Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic, and the U.S., the company delivered over 9 million custom-printed products in 2023 to approximately 1.8 million business and private customers in 157 countries.
Location
Germany
Employees
1,000
Industry
eCommerce/
Apparel
Product
DWH powered by the Exasol Analytics Engine
The Challenges
Spread Group’s BI solutions were originally built on MySQL and Pentaho. These technologies could no longer meet the dynamic requirements of a modern eCommerce business.
The result: long waiting times and delayed data delivery, which hindered timely decision-making. In addition, the existing system required extensive performance tuning, consuming significant staff time and resources.
“As an eCommerce company, we are constantly exposed to short-term trends – and must be able to respond to them with speed and agility.“
– Stefan Morgenroth, Spread Group
The Solution
After conducting a thorough market analysis, Spread Group turned to consulting firm BARC for support in identifying the right BI stack. Feasibility studies were carried out with Exasol, Snowflake, and Vertica.
Exasol stood out not only for its exceptional performance but also for its ease of integration.
The new IT solution was implemented on-premises in the Frankfurt data center. Exasol provided detailed blueprints for data ingestion, enabling the initial loading of business data in just two days.
For reporting, the company chose Strategy (formerly Microstrategy) as the front-end tool. This setup allowed the business to base decisions on up-to-date daily data.
The Results
164x faster report delivery
Around 200 employees now access current data every day—a dramatic improvement compared to the past, when decision-makers often had to wait until midday for the previous day’s results.
Six-figure annual savings in commissions
One business unit achieved significant cost savings thanks to the new reporting capabilities, allowing the investment in the new solution to pay off quickly.
Real-time analytics for power users
About 50 power users in marketing, sales, and production can now create reports themselves and retrieve results instantly – enabling faster decisions and more efficient processes.
Automated performance tuning
The new solution eliminates the manual effort previously required to optimize query performance, freeing up resources for higher-value tasks.
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