Case Study
AAH Pharmaceuticals
Ingres 2006 on Linux - Remarkable Performance for the UK's Premier Pharmaceutical Wholesaler, AAH Pharmaceuticals Ltd.
Industry: Pharmaceuticals
Ingres Products: Ingres RDBMS
A Nimble Competitor Relies On Software That Adapts to Its Ever-Changing Needs
AAH Pharmaceuticals Ltd. (AAH) is the UK's leading distributor of pharmaceutical and healthcare products and services to pharmacies, hospitals and doctors. AAH delivers 2.6 million products daily, from prescription drugs to diabetic foods.
With over 4,000 employees and 19 distribution warehouses in the UK and Northern Ireland, AAH uses Ingres technology to run all of its most important business applications, including stock, sales, invoicing and master data maintenance.
"Our IT infrastructure depends on the reliability and scalability of our Ingres databases," says Richard David, senior DB administrator for AAH. "It just runs quietly and reliably. It is the basis of many of our core business systems and the support is outstanding." added Geraint Jones, an IT Product Manager at AAH.
To compete in the UK's ever-changing and strictly regulated healthcare market, AAH must have an IT infrastructure capable of growing and changing with the business. As one example, AAH was able to seamlessly integrate the legacy systems of its constituent companies, Enterprise (the leading wholesaler of health and beauty products in the UK) and Trident (a shortline distributor of generics and parallel imports). As a middleman between its suppliers and customers, AAH seeks to provide its partners with flexible support services that can adapt to constantly changing market trends.
In 2006, AAH began testing a migration of its systems onto Ingres 2006, running on Linux. The results were nothing short of spectacular - "It practically installs itself in a matter of minutes and queries that once took five hours to process, now take less than 20 minutes . . .This is by far the best Ingres product I've seen in 17 years," says Richard. And, Ingres 2006 is cost effective: "In less than three years, we will have recovered our costs while gaining greater efficiencies and higher performance by running Ingres 2006 on smaller and more powerful Linux servers," says Richard. Based on these impressive results, AAH has decided to roll our Ingres across its estate during 2007.
AAH will look to Ingres to help it move into the future, as it continues to develop warehouse support systems, supply chain support solutions, customer ordering and information systems and various communication technologies to serve both the changing needs of the markets and its suppliers and customers.