Overcoming dashboard limitations in pharmacy retail
Pharmacy retail is one of the most data-intensive forms of retail, and Grupo Panvel operates at that pace across hundreds of physical stores, a robust e-commerce operation, an app that ranks among the most used in pharmacy retail and a health and wellness business that goes beyond selling medicine. High product turnover, expiration dates, seasonality, regulated pricing, a loyalty program, prescriptions and omnichannel behavior all generate data. The challenge was never a shortage of information. It was getting that information to the people who needed it, when they needed it.
Grupo Panvel didn’t lack dashboards; it had the opposite problem. Every time the business changed, a new question would arise that the existing dashboards couldn’t answer. Someone would then file a request with the BI team. The dashboard catalog kept growing while the old ones sat unused, each one built to answer a single moment in time rather than the next question that would inevitably follow.
“We had a report or a dashboard for almost everything, and that was exactly the problem. The moment a question strayed even a little off script, we were back to filing a ticket,” said Max Reis, Data Engineering Specialist at Grupo Panvel.
What Grupo Panvel wanted instead was simple: let people ask a question in Portuguese, the way they’d ask a colleague, like “how did generics sell last week, broken down by store,” and get the number and the chart back immediately, without anyone having to build a new dashboard.
