Case Study: Alì Supermercati achieves scalable, customer‑centric analytics and granular historical insights with Vertica

Innovate technology to innovate the business

Alì Supermercati, founded in 1971 and today operating over 100 outlets in Veneto and Emilia‑Romagna with more than 3,000 employees (≈€1bn revenue in 2015), faced limits from its legacy MOLAP BI: short historical depth, limited storage and granularity, and poor support for comparative and customer‑centric analyses. The company needed to adapt its technical infrastructure to give business lines timely product and customer information.

Alì replaced its stack with a Big Data analytics platform—Vertica (columnar, multiprocessing, multi‑node), an ETL layer and new visualization tools—and consolidated sales, supply chain and accounting marts into a single data warehouse. The change enabled storage of granular historical data (~2 TB of receipt data), creation of ~300 KPIs per customer, basket analysis and one‑to‑one promotions, churn forecasting, staffing forecasts and fraud detection, shifting focus from product to client and opening new analytic possibilities while driving user adoption through training.

Alì Supermercati