Case study

Stokrotka improves retail analytics by migrating its data warehouse to the cloud

Polish supermarket chain Stokrotka migrated its 15-terabyte data warehouse to AWS in just 3 months and achieved a 100% improvement in performance as well as cost reduction.

Industry

Retail

Key Focus

Migration, Data Analytics

Industry

Retail

Key Focus

Migration, Data Analytics

Meet the client

Stokrotka is a retail chain with long traditions in Polish retailing. Established in 1994 in Lublin, it has almost 1000 stores across Poland. Stokrotka is growing dynamically, opening around 100 stores a year in formats tailored to customers: Stokrotka Supermarket, Market, Optima, and Express. The chain also operates an online store. The company has distribution centers, logistics resources, and a network of regional warehouses throughout Poland. In 2018 Stokrotka Sp. z o.o. became part of the Lithuanian Maxima trading group.

Business need

01
A scalable data warehouse to meet the demand of a growing retail chain
02
Efficient data processing
03
Seamless integration with the existing BI tool
04
Rapid implementation with no disruptions in the transition period

Searching for a better data solution

Stokrotka operates from almost 1,000 stores across Poland and runs its distribution network to ensure that each of its retail outlets is properly supplied with stock. It generates large volumes of business data, uploaded to a data warehouse, and then processed using a popular business intelligence (BI) tool.

Stokrotka was looking to improve the performance and availability of its data warehouse while maintaining its existing front-end BI interface. The project needed to be completed quickly, cost-effectively, and without causing any downtime.

Data warehouse migration in 3 months

Stokrotka looked at several data warehousing services. After conducting a series of tests involving feeding the tools with the same data and requesting the same reports, it turned out that AWS was delivering much faster results, and it was more cost-effective.

After completing a proof of concept, Stokrotka decided to migrate all 15 terabytes of data from its existing storage systems to Amazon Redshift. A serverless data integration service (AWS Glue) is used to collect the data and prepare it in a faster and cheaper manner. AWS Lambda, a serverless computing service that powers the system, allows for further cost reduction.

The system was integrated with the previously used Business Intelligence tool without any disruption to operational continuity. The implemented AWS tools improved the BI tool’s performance by 100 percent. The BI tool users still work with the same interface so there was no need for staff retraining.

The entire project, from proof of concept to production launch, was completed in just 3 months. Stokrotka’s data warehouse is now scalable, so there is no need to add and configure new hardware as the chain continues to expand. The new system is also resistant to performance issues during peak traffic and the valuable data from the 1000 stores is delivered in near real-time.

We are now delivering even better information to the people making business decisions. Tameshi understood the challenge and worked hard with us to achieve it. IT projects usually take longer than expected and cost more, but in this case, it took less time than I was expecting.

Paweł Kowlaczyk, Stokrotka

CTO