About the company

A leading provider of airline provisioning services and catering solutions.

Challenge

The company was facing several reporting challenges. Information and data points siloed from various sources and stored in multiple location-specific databases spread across several countries increased the complexity. The company relied on a batch process to build and process data, which took over five hours. Ineffective data lineage, data mapping and changing business demands, combined with multiple data sources including relational and non-relational databases, resulted in reporting errors. Its legacy reporting solution was managed on-premises at various data centers, leading to costly management and maintenance and latency issues for the reporting platform. The service provider sought a technology partner to help design and develop a next-generation data platform.

What we did

• Data governance and architecture
• Master data management
• Data migration
• Data warehousing and business intelligence
• Amazon Web Services (AWS) data migration service

Solution

Following a 360-degree data assessment, our team developed the following strategy:

• AWS was selected as a cloud platform to reduce maintenance costs and latency issues and improve reporting performance.
  • AWS was the recommended data ingestion platform for its flexibility, reliability and scalability.
  • AWS Lambda functions were orchestrated to trigger and process files and move them to respective Simple Storage Service (S3) buckets based on success/failure criteria.
• After analyzing the data, AWS Glue jobs were recommended over other technologies and patterns as a cost-effective solution; AWS Glue was used to transform and load data from disparate data points.
• The transformed data was then stored in a centralized repository created in AWS Redshift to allow near-real-time access to operational data from various sources, each linked to its database.
• The global operational data in AWS Redshift enabled the organization to make timely and educated business decisions to meet and exceed internal and external customer requirements.
• Version control was built using AWS CodeCommit and AWS CodePipeline to help ensure that codes developed by various users can access the most recent version of the master code.
• Microsoft Power BI was deployed to provide a quick view to create reports, which allowed select teams to have immediate access to historical data and assist departments, including security, compliance and transportation, and improve efficiency across units by facilitating users to make faster decisions with accurate reporting to customers.
• AWS Simple Email Service and AWS Lambda functions were utilized for error notifications.

Results and outcomes

With the implementation of a single reporting source, the company realized the following outcomes and benefits:

Business benefits

• Improved decisions on a real-time basis for data readiness to key end users
• Established appropriate data accessibility and availability at a user level across departments for analysis to make informed business decisions
• Provided faster data availability: 10 minutes compared to 5 hours previously
• Established a single source of truth for creating reports across departments, with each department given access to pertinent information

Technical benefits

• 4 months to complete data migration from on-premises to AWS S3 using available global data
• Adaptable sources to assist developers in attaining code standards
• Version control to enable developers to access the latest code
• 90% reduction in manual processes