Stokrotka Transforms Retail Analytics and Business Intelligence with Tameshi on AWS

Polish supermarket chain Stokrotka migrated its 15 TB data warehouse to Amazon Web Services (AWS) to improve performance and support its growth plans. Working with AWS Partner Tameshi, the migration helped streamline its operations and reduce downtime. The move to AWS also helped optimize Stokrotka's data management, doubled the performance of its business intelligence (BI) tool, and gave the chain a scalable, efficient, and cost-effective solution. Tameshi used Amazon Redshift and Amazon S3 to complete the migration in 3 months.

Founded in 1994, Stokrotka is a Poland-based supermarket chain with almost 1,000 stores around the country and over 12,000 employees. The company operates its own distribution network to ensure that each of its retail outlets is properly supplied with stock. It generates large volumes of business data, which is uploaded to a data warehouse and then processed using a popular BI tool.

Stokrotka had recently migrated its databases to AWS using local AWS Partner Tameshi, an IT consultancy that specializes in cloud services. The next step in Stokrotka’s digital transformation was to improve the performance and availability of its data warehouse while maintaining its existing front-end BI interface.

Stokrotka’s chief technology officer Pawel Kowalczyk and his team investigated different options, conducting tests using the same dataset and different data warehousing services. “We looked at a number of solutions with the same data and requesting the same reports,” says Kowalczyk. “AWS was delivering much faster results, and it was more cost effective, so there was no need to look further.” After a successful proof of concept (POC), the two companies decided to migrate all 15 TB of data from its existing storage systems and to process it using AWS, before feeding that data to the same BI front end it was already using. It was vital to Stokrotka that the project was completed quickly, cost effectively, and without causing any downtime.

A smooth transition was essential to ensure continuity for business users of the BI tool. “We didn’t want any disruption for users of the tool,” says Kowalczyk. “The service had to remain available throughout the transformation and we didn’t want to change the underlying technology because that would cause disruption and staff would need re-training.”

Central to its BI transformation was Amazon Redshift, which powers data-driven decisions with the best price-performance cloud data warehouse. To collect the data, it used AWS Glue, a serverless data integration service that makes data preparation simpler, faster, and cheaper. The data lake was created using Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), object storage built to retrieve any amount of data from anywhere. Finally, to optimize costs, Stokrotka powered the system using AWS Lambda, a serverless, event-driven compute service that lets you run code for virtually any type of application or backend service without thinking about servers or clusters.

This combination of AWS services improved the BI tool’s performance by 100 percent and supported the company’s growth. Kowalczyk says he was very pleased that the project fulfilled his requirements. “Nobody noticed the change,” says Kowalczyk. “They are still using the same BI tool, but the source is now Redshift. Tameshi managed to bypass the technological differences between our previous data warehouse and RedShift. Our users are now using the same tools but with much better performance.”

The project kicked off in January 2023 and was completed, tested, and in production 3 months later. “Using AWS, we get twice the performance of our previous system for about the same cost,” says Kowalczyk. “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 and was on budget.”

Stokrotka’s data warehouse is now scalable, so the company can expand without the time and expenditure of adding and configuring new hardware. The system no longer suffers from performance issues during peak traffic periods, and provides near-real-time data from all 1,000 stores. Information provided by its BI tool has helped Stokrotka successfully expand over the past few years and the company hopes to continue that trajectory. “Using AWS we are now delivering even better information to the people making business decisions, so I expect us to carry on expanding,” says Kowalczyk.

Tameshi has shared a great deal of knowledge with Stokrotka’s technical team members, who are already able to manage the new infrastructure themselves. “The AWS managed services are working just as we hoped and we can already support the infrastructure we have,” says Kowalczyk. “Tameshi are highly skilled experts and we were learning as we went.” He adds that Stokrotka’s team will continue to build up its technical expertise and find new ways of using technology to gain a competitive advantage. “Using AWS, we know that technology will never be the barrier to our growth,” says Kowalczyk.