Customer Story

Pharma Company Builds AI-Ready Foundation with End-to-End Databricks Solution

What we did

From strategy to AI readiness, we maximized Databricks capabilities across the data lifecycle to transform how the company works with data and improve decision making.

Built a centralized data lakehouse using Databricks to transform legacy systems, automate critical reporting, and lay the foundation for future AI and predictive analytics.

Enabled business teams to explore governed, real-time insights into profitability, vendor performance, and account activity — supporting smarter decisions and operational scale as the company expands nationally

Industry

  • Healthcare

Technologies

  • Databricks
  • ·
  • Power BI

The Problem

As this pharmaceutical distributor expanded nationally, its data and reporting processes needed to keep pace with a more complex business. Teams across finance, procurement, and compliance couldn’t get timely, consistent answers to critical questions about margins, contracts, and vendor performance. The data existed, but it wasn’t structured or governed in a way that made it easy to access, interpret, or act on confidently.

“AI will help us move faster, but it won’t replace the people who know this business best. It takes a dual-pronged approach — you need to really pair up good humans and good data to push the business to the next level.“

VP of Data at Pharmaceutical Distributor

The Solution & Results

To support immediate needs and enable long-term scalability, Analytics8:

  • Started with a data strategy and roadmap aligned to business goals, focusing on high-impact use cases like line-item profitability, order & shortage tracking, and vendor performance.
  • Provided technology recommendations, selecting Databricks for its ability to handle granular data, support modular architecture, and provide seamless governance via built-in features — making it a strong fit for near-term reporting and longer-term AI initiatives.
  • Built a three-tier lakehouse architecture in Databricks that ingested multiple source systems using Fivetran and replaced redundant reports with reusable, governed data models aligned to business processes. Unity Catalog was used to document lineage and definitions — creating consistent, trusted data and removing the organization’s reliance on tribal knowledge.
  • Delivered governed, analytics-ready data into Power BI, providing multi-department self-service access to a consistent set of core metrics. This reduced manual analysis and provided aggregated reporting views to improve and speed up decision-making.
  • Automated profitability reporting at the contract, product, customer, and line-item level, helping Finance quickly identify low-margin deals and take corrective action. Teams responsible for contracts and chargebacks can now move faster to finalize agreements. Additional dashboards now track vendor performance against contract terms, enabling procurement to respond quickly to shortages and maintain service continuity.
  • Positioned the company to operationalize AI using Databricks by harmonizing diverse data sets and identifying two high-value use cases: predictive account churn and automated analysis of external market data using generative AI to summarize and distill third-party research. The company also plans to apply machine learning to autonomously model more proactive pricing strategies based on customer segmentation analytics — helping teams make more timely, relevant, and profitable offers that strengthen customer loyalty.

The company’s VP of Data emphasized that while AI will help scale insight generation, human expertise remains essential to guide and interpret results. “It takes a dual-pronged approach,” she said. “You need to really pair up good humans and good data to push the business to the next level.”

With Databricks at the core, the company now has a scalable platform that helps teams make faster, more confident decisions that support company growth goals and deliver a better customer experience.

Analysts no longer need to hunt for answers — they have clear definitions, reliable sources, and governed access to what they need. Reports that once took weeks now run in minutes. Improved analytics have inspired critical improvements to business operations, including quicker contract execution, faster product delivery, quicker response to supply chain disruptions, and more profitable pricing strategies based on accurate margin insights.

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