Fresenius Medical Care Deutschland GmbH

The Challenge: Large Quantities of Highly Sensitive Data

The range of data gathered varies widely. Commercial and financial data from procurement, logistics, sales and marketing and accounting is processed in a company-wide SAP data warehouse. Meanwhile, highly sensitive medical data that relates to patients and treatment, is collected at the various clinics and kept in the company’s own Clinical Information Center. Exasol helps staff with reading machine data, drawing up predictive forecasts and carrying out internal analyzes of market data collected by the company.

There are two use cases that apply at Fresenius Medical Care – one involving machine data and one for market data:

“Our dialysis machines have all kinds of different sensor systems,” says Thomas Lober, Director Center of Excellence Business Intelligence, Fresenius Medical Care Deutschland GmbH. “When it comes to blood cleansing or dialysis, we’re dealing with a highly sensitive area. There are thousands of parameters here. What we want to do is evaluate these parameters and predict maintenance requirements using specific algorithms. Our aim is to be proactive rather than waiting until individual clinics report machine failures to us.”

Fresenius is also keen to bolster its strong competitive position in the market long term. “We are therefore taking a close look at our market competitor survey to see what the dialysis market has to offer, how accurate our market share is and how we could develop this over the next few years,” says Thomas Lober. “Before Exasol, we used to collect this data manually and store it in huge Excel lists. Now we put it in a new database via an interface and can analyze it from there. The critical issue here is not the volume of the data, but the way it is structured and the diverse range it covers across the various clinics and countries.”

The Benefit: Meaningful Reports Based on Current Data

Comprehensive reports are now available to employees. They are able to find out if all machines are running smoothly or need maintenance; The types of faults occurring etc. Teams across the organisation can access these reports and quickly analyze the data. On the basis of defined KPIs and a concept behind, the KPIs of all countries are compared on a quarterly basis. The data is then summarized on-the-fly so that it can be visualized later. This country comparison is essential for management.

Fresenius are so satisfied with the performance and proven stability of Exasol, that they have decided to take things a stage further and expand its use to cover a global production unit whose staff are responsible for all production and quality sites worldwide. “Since they work in an approved environment, we have set up our own Exasol cluster,” says Thomas Lober. “Quality is an area where everything needs to be precisely documented: every interface, every change, every data flow, every report. We wanted to avoid mixing this kind of data with other data.” The rules and regulations that have to be complied with include requirements set out by the Global Data Protection Agency (GDPA), the good practice (GxP) guidelines that apply primarily to the medical and pharmaceutical sector, and the guidelines issued by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

“This is another area where Exasol has impressed us again and again,” says Thomas Lober, summing things up. “The system runs extremely smoothly, practically maintains itself, doesn’t degenerate and always performs to a high level – a real quantum leap forward from our previous database system. We have seen a notable increase in data volume, yet in spite of this there has been no indication that the system is reaching its limit. We are genuinely very happy to have found a future-proof solution that we can continue to rely on in the years to come.”