Apotek 1’s Data-Driven Vision

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 Espresso, a high-performance analytics accelerator that has changed how Apotek 1 uses data.

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.

Unlocking Business Value

Apotek 1’s switch to the Exasol Espresso marked a turning point in their analytics journey, delivering immediate and tangible benefits.

Democratizing Insights with Self-Service Analytics

With the ability to leverage self-service analytics using Exasol Espresso, Apotek 1 optimized their marketing campaigns and achieved returns, including:

• Optimized Promotional Effectiveness: With Exasol Espresso, staff have access to more detailed analysis on how promotions impact sales, inventory, space management and the calculation of actual uplifts of a campaign. Using these insights Apotek 1 can fine tune stock management approaches and promotional campaigns to improve uplift.
• Accelerated Insights: Query performance improved by 10 to 100 times, enabling users to ask complex questions and combine data in ways that were previously unattainable.
• Enhanced Data Interactivity: With more responsive dashboards and interactive data, users now have the flexibility to run experiments and explore new insights.

Eliminating Data Pipeline Bottlenecks

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:

• Significantly Reducing Processing Times: By integrating the ODS layer with Exasol, Apotek 1 achieved a remarkable 10 to 100-fold improvement in data pipeline performance compared to their previous solution.
• Enhancing Data Availability: With optimized data pipelines, Apotek 1 ensured that users could access the most up-to-date information without waiting for loading processes or experiencing incomplete data transfers.

The Road Ahead

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.