Gintarinė Vaistinė Speeds Up Analytics with Exasol Data Warehouse for Real-Time Insights
Lithuanian pharmaceutical retailer and wholesaler Gintarinė Vaistinė needed a high-performance analytics database to power its growing Tableau environment. With over 2 billion rows of stock inventory and 6 million external queries per month, its legacy Vertica system couldn‘t keep pace. After moving to Exasol Data Warehouse, Gintarinė Vaistinė gained the ability to analyze data in near real-time, enabling better inventory management, customer behavior insights, and overall business agility.
Benefits for Gintarinė Vaistinė:
Lithuania and Baltic region
240+
Pharma
Exasol Espresso
Gintarinė Vaistinė, a leading pharmaceutical company in Lithuania, operates over 240 pharmacies under the Gintarinė Vaistinė brand and serves as a wholesale distributor across the Baltics through its Limedika subsidiary. As an omnichannel business with both online and offline presence, Gintarinė Vaistinė and Limedika rely heavily on data analytics to optimize inventory levels, understand customer needs, and make timely decisions.
Gintarinė Vaistinė analytics operated on a legacy Vertica data warehouse that was struggling to handle the company’s data volume and complexity. With over 10,000 unique SKUs across its retail and wholesale businesses, the company needed to analyze massive amounts of data to optimize inventory levels and understand product performance. The sales fact table alone grew by millions of records per day, with two years of history stored for trend analysis. Complex queries could take 30 seconds or more, hindering the speed of insights. Likewise, with Vertica, the company had to pre-join data into flat tables to reduce the cost of joining certain tables.
Martynas Gelzinis, Chief Innovation Officer at Gintarinė Vaistinė, noted the impact on user adoption: “With slower systems, people tend not to use them. If people can make a coffee while waiting for a report, the system isn’t efficient.”
Gintarinė Vaistinė needed a new approach to deliver the fast query response times that would enable more proactive data usage across the organization.
In 2020, Gintarinė Vaistinė evaluated several solutions to replace Vertica and support its growing Tableau deployment. After testing Exasol, the company was impressed by the performance and scalability.
With Exasol, Gintarinė Vaistinė expanded its capacity to handle a stock inventory table that had grown to around 2 billion rows and continues to increase by millions of records per day, as well as, onboarding new sources and users with ease. Exasol delivered immediate query response, with times dropping from 30 seconds on Vertica to under 2 seconds on Exasol for the same workloads before Tableau report rendering and calculation builds.
Based on the successful experience Gintarinė Vaistinė moved forward with Exasol Data Warehouse. The Exasol team provided deployment support to ensure a smooth transition. The result was a high-performance, scalable analytics environment that integrated easily with Tableau.
With Exasol powering analytics Gintarinė Vaistinė has transformed data access and speed across the organization. Data is now loaded continuously from source systems, with Salesforce data updated every 15 minutes and sales data updated daily. All Tableau dashboards query the data live, so the data is always fresh, enabling:
By storing data at the most granular level, Gintarinė Vaistinė has the flexibility to slice and dice data in any way needed to answer new questions.
“To be honest, they [users] don’t really appreciate or understand the value Exasol provides because everything just works. But that’s a good thing. The real benefit comes from how we can store atomic-level data and slice it in any way imaginable to answer new questions,” Martynas explains. “Business users don’t always understand the downsides of only having aggregated data. So while they may take it for granted, the flexibility and speed we can provide is hugely valuable.”
This granular data supports use cases like:
Having granular, real-time data is also critical for Gintarinė Vaistinė‘s data science initiatives. The company is using Exasol as a feature store to feed customer attributes into NVIDIA’s machine learning platform. The data science team develops models for use cases like customer segmentation, then pushes the scores back into Exasol to fuel analytics and operational processes.
“Exasol is like a central system connecting our operational activities in sales, inventory, and marketing with our predictive analytics,” describes Martynas.
Exasol has made it easier for business users to integrate new data sources for their analysis. Power users can rapidly add new tables in Exasol and make them available for exploration in Tableau.
If the analysis proves valuable, sources are pushed into production.
“With our previous database, adding a new dimension was very time-consuming and laborious,” Martynas recalls. “Now our analysts have the flexibility to move quickly and drive more value from data.”
This agility supports use cases like analyzing sales team activity data from Salesforce to ensure proper territory coverage and compliance. Any analysis that provides value to the business can be productionized quickly.
Gintarinė Vaistinė is excited to expand its use of Exasol Data Warehouse to support predictive analytics and machine learning.
The data science team is eager to explore Exasol’s capabilities for in-database machine learning using languages like Python and R. The ability to run ML scoring functions directly in Exasol Data Warehouse could streamline the process of operationalizing insights.
“It’s hard to predict what new Exasol features or ecosystem integrations will emerge,” states Martynas. “But capabilities like in-database machine learning could be very beneficial for use cases like promotion optimization. We’re excited to see what’s possible as the platform evolves.”
Gintarinė Vaistinė is also continuing to bring
in new data sources to expand its customer 360 analytics. Integrating detailed marketing campaign data from platforms like Salesforce Marketing Cloud will provide deeper insights into omnichannel customer journeys and offer personalization.
As Gintarinė Vaistinė’s data volume and business continues to grow, the company is confi-dent that its analytics infrastructure powered by Exasol will keep pace.
“With Exasol, we have a future-proof foundation for analytics,” concludes Martynas. “We’ve seen the impact that fast, flexible data access can have on the business. We’re excited to scale our analytics and uncover new insights as we grow.”
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