QKTech Streamlines Search Performance for a Leading Retail Pharma Company
Industry & Segment
Pharma
Objective
To replace the legacy search engine with a fast, scalable Elasticsearch solution that improves search performance, relevance, and operational efficiency.
Partners
Elastic
Overview
A large retail pharma company in India connects an extensive network of 2.5 lakh chemists and druggists and 12,000 wholesalers and stockists, managing over 3 lakh SKUs across more than 6,000 brands.
The platform powers B2B transactions between distributors and retailers, providing seamless access to healthcare products across India’s pharmaceutical supply chain. As the user base expanded, maintaining high search relevance, speed, and scalability became critical for ensuring a smooth and reliable customer experience.
Engagement Overview
The client’s existing search engine had become highly complex, managing close to 5,000 indexes that slowed performance and complicated every enhancement. The result was poor search response times and growing operational complexity, which significantly affected both efficiency and user satisfaction.
QKTech was engaged to design and implement a new Elasticsearch-based search engine to replace the legacy system. The goal was to deliver a faster, smarter, and more efficient enterprise search experience, enabling distributors and retailers to quickly find and buy relevant products while reducing the cost and complexity of managing the system.
Business Challenges
Slow search response times
The existing search engine struggled to return results quickly, affecting user engagement.
High operational complexity
Managing and maintaining over 5,000 indexes significantly increased maintenance effort and slowed updates.
Inflexible search architecture
Frequent changes required large-scale reindexing, delaying new features and driving up costs.
Poor user experience
Retailers and distributors often faced difficulties finding products, reducing satisfaction, and transaction speed.
QKTech’s Solution and Approach
To address these challenges, QKTech implemented a high-performance search engine powered by Elasticsearch, delivering optimized performance, improved search accuracy, and simplified operations.
Organized Search Architecture
- Replaced the legacy search engine with a new Elasticsearch-based system built for scalability and speed.
- Reduced approximately 5,000 indexes to just 2, simplifying operations and making maintenance far more efficient.
- Introduced incremental indexing using Logstash with JDBC plugins to enable faster data updates and smoother performance.
Enhanced Search Relevance and Customization
- Developed custom analyzers using edge n-gram, lowercase, and keyword tokenizers, along with word delimiter token filters to improve result accuracy and ranking.
- Implemented Mustache-based search templates with pre-defined queries (term, match_phrase, prefix, match) and sorting logic to ensure faster and more relevant search results.
- Improved overall search response time and user experience through precise query filtering and advanced tokenization.
Strategic Business Outcomes
Delivered faster
more relevant search results, enabling retailers and distributors to find products quickly and improving overall engagement.
Reduced system complexity
and operational costs by simplifying infrastructure and improving scalability.
Improved system performance
through faster response times, strengthening user trust and satisfaction.
Built a scalable
future-ready platform capable of supporting larger data volumes and evolving business needs.
Results Achieved
5,000 to 2
indexes consolidated
60,000
events/min indexing throughput achieved
2× faster
search response time
4+
custom analyzers implemented for relevance tuning
100%
reusable mustache-based search templates
Zero
full reindexing required for incremental updates
Business Impact
- Reduced index volume from 5,000+ to 2, simplifying system architecture and improving manageability.
- Achieved high event throughput of up to 60,000 events per minute during indexing.
- Improved query performance and search accuracy with custom analyzers and reusable search templates.
- Lowered operational and maintenance complexity, freeing up technical resources for innovation.
Conclusion
QKTech’s Elasticsearch implementation transformed a complex, underperforming search system into a streamlined, high-performance engine. By optimizing index structures, improving search relevance, and reducing maintenance overhead, QKTech helped the client deliver a faster, more intuitive, and reliable experience across its nationwide retail pharma operations.
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