How Apps Associates Eliminates Silos to Maximize Data and Deliver Transformative Business Insights

By Myles Gilsenan, Vice President, Data, Analytics, and AI – Apps Associates
By Sudhir Gupta, Principal Partner Solutions Architect, Analytics Specialist – AWS

Apps Associates

When it comes to data, many organizations deal with multiple source systems such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) software, as well as multiple data types. There are also individual employee processes that leverage data in a highly manual way.

Offering comprehensive data modernization and cloud migration services, Apps Associates employs a modern data architecture approach centered around Amazon Redshift to break down data silos, reduce manual effort, and enable organizations to extract value from their entire data estate.

In this post, you will learn how Amazon Redshift helps you build a modern data platform to deliver key insights from your business’ data by providing scalable, flexible, and cost-efficient visibility across the entire business.

Apps Associates’ pre-built Analytics Accelerators automate the extraction, transformation, and loading of data from popular cloud-based and on-premises ERP and CRM systems into Amazon Redshift. This enables organizations to get up and running in a matter of weeks with a detailed, cross-domain data and analytics solution.

By implementing Amazon Redshift and integrating it with other Amazon Web Services (AWS) solutions, Apps Associates enables you to begin leveraging advanced analytic techniques like machine learning (ML) and predictive analytics to realize positive outcomes such as reducing costs.

Apps Associates is an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner and Managed Service Provider (MSP) with more than 10 years of experience managing complex workloads on AWS. Leveraging deep technical knowledge, processes, and tools, Apps Associates helps customers plan, execute, and transition to AWS.

Apps Associates Analytics Accelerators

Apps Associates combines consulting expertise and its pre-built Analytics Accelerators to rapidly deploy Amazon Redshift-based reporting and analytics solutions for customers.

Apps Associates Analytics Accelerators create a data platform that eliminates silos, improves efficiencies, and delivers key insights transparently, enabling your business to use all data (unstructured, semi-structured, and structured) to improve business operations, get new customers, and increase revenue. When an issue occurs somewhere in the business, such as a missed order, there’s timely visibility as to where and how it happened.

To secure a holistic view of your business, it’s critical to bring data from all departments together—finance, operations, sales, manufacturing, human resources—and gain insights across the company. Although dashboards offering an enterprise overview are important, being able to drill down into the data and see across units or divisions is even better.

Businesses also can benefit from a single source of truth for data that’s transparent and traceable, with visibility into the entire data lifecycle.

To make the most of your data, securing and leveraging key insights, it’s crucial to move beyond manual analysis—with expert consulting to leverage the power of the cloud and secure transformative business outcomes.

Amazon Redshift helps with the last mile in a modern data and analytics strategy after migration—to make better use of data—achieving productivity, agility, and future-proofing success by delivering data in a timely manner, with the right context.

Figure 1 – Benefits of Amazon Redshift.

Amazon Redshift provides native and seamless integration with other data and analytics services like Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), AWS Glue, Amazon EMR, Amazon Athena, Amazon QuickSight, and Amazon SageMaker.

With Amazon Redshift Serverless, customers can get started on Redshift in seconds without having to set up, manage, or scale data warehouse infrastructure.

How it Works

The basic implementation flow is to first create serverless resources and then connect, load sample data, and begin running queries on the data.

Amazon Redshift can provide organizations with a scalable, flexible, and cost-efficient cloud-based platform that brings together all the data—structured, semi-structured, and unstructured—in one console view.

With Amazon Redshift ML, customers can build, train, and apply machine learning models using simple SQL commands.

The combination of Amazon Redshift coupled with the pre-built data pipelines and analytics content of Apps Associates’ Analytics Accelerators has enabled numerous companies to rapidly move up the analytics maturity curve—from manual spreadsheets to automation and data-driven decision making.

The core of Apps Associates’ Analytics Accelerators is a set of cross-subject area data models designed specifically for Redshift for finance, procurement, supply chain, and HR. These data models enable organizations to view their data with a wide angle lens while also drilling down to detail where needed to explain anomalies.

In addition to the data models, Apps Associates has created pre-built data pipelines into Redshift for popular cloud-based and on-premises ERP and CRM systems, as well as set of rich dashboards and reports for both executives and line managers.

Outlined below is the architecture for Apps Associates’ Analytics Accelerators.

Figure 2 – Apps Associates’ Analytics Accelerators.

With Apps Associates’ Analytics Accelerators, the end result is rapid deployment of an Amazon Redshift-based, cross-subject area data and analytics platform in a matter of weeks. Reducing manual efforts and streamlining data analysis across all departments, employees can secure more robust insights faster.

Apps Associates can also help clients identify use cases for high-impact ML and predictive analytics and implement these with Amazon Redshift.

Overall Business Outcomes

Amazon Redshift, coupled with Apps Associates’ Analytics Accelerators, delivers an uptick in self-service capabilities for employees. With employees now able to create their own dashboards, the burden is removed from IT teams. It also helps provide a significant cost decrease in IT due to less maintenance required.

The overall pace of innovation is dramatically improved, as analytics instances can be fired up in minutes at high volumes and be brought down just as quickly.

With pay-as-you-go pricing, Amazon Redshift enables customers to dramatically reduce operating costs. There’s no need to purchase and maintain hardware or overprovision, because Amazon Redshift can scale as needed.

In today’s fast-paced economy, speed is the lifeblood of success. Companies in all industries recognize that access to trusted, secure, timely, and accurate data is the key to making swift and informed strategic and operational decisions. This data-driven agility can be the decisive factor between staying competitive and falling behind, or even facing obsolescence. Apps Associates’ Analytics Accelerators are the vehicle for rapid time to value and strategic insights.

Use Cases for Retail and Media Industries

A leader in the appliance manufacturing industry needed to align its financial processes and software to a rapidly digitizing retail industry. The customer wanted to proactively identify issues with unrecognized revenue—something their existing systems could not do. Specifically, they sought to reconcile variances between cash receipts and bank statements.

With the dashboard configurations and reports possible in the new Amazon Redshift-based data warehouse, Apps Associates helped the customer identify variances across the different subledgers and introduce a streamlined process to identify discrepancies. This reduced the amount of time needed to close monthly financial books, providing a more complete picture of the business’ financial data.

In addition, leveraging transaction details from sales helped ensure every single source of revenue was captured.

Figure 3 – High-level architecture diagram from customer.

Meanwhile, Mood Media, which provides in-store media solutions to businesses to enhance the customer experience, migrated its on-premises system to AWS—improving reliability, scalability, and productivity, while reducing overall cost.

To secure analytics previously, Mood Media had implemented a data and analytics solution that proved to be costly, inflexible, and difficult to maintain. Additionally, Mood Media was not getting the increase in self-service analytics that was anticipated.

As a result, the company chose to retire its existing data and analytics platform and transition to Amazon Redshift as its new data platform, with Tableau as the reporting frontend. Apps Associates’ Analytics Accelerators made rapid deployment possible.

After implementation of the new Amazon Redshift-based data and analytics platform, Mood Media saw a dramatic increase in efficiency and self-service capabilities—also reducing costs and achieving greater and more timely business insights.

Figure 4 – Mood Media architecture.

AWS is constantly rolling out new solutions that Apps Associates can deploy to Mood Media instantly, helping the business take immediate advantage of the latest technologies as they emerge.

Conclusion

In this post, you learned how Amazon Redshift and its integration with other AWS services enables organizations to leverage all data quickly with several positive business outcomes. Easy to use, scalable, and flexible, Amazon Redshift can support the most advanced analytics use cases—including machine learning and predictive analytics.

Amazon Redshift can help businesses lower expenses and increase revenue, and Apps Associates can significantly speed time to insight. With pre-built accelerators, Apps Associates gets organizations up and running quickly and efficiently on an Amazon Redshift-based data and analytics platform.

Leveraging deep expertise with common data sources like Oracle, Salesforce, Workday, Kronos, Epic, and many others, Apps Associates can help customers tackle today’s most complex business challenges.

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Apps Associates – AWS Partner Spotlight

Apps Associates is an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner with more than 10 years of experience managing complex workloads on AWS. Leveraging deep technical knowledge, processes, and tools, Apps Associates helps customers plan, execute, and transition to AWS.

Contact Apps Associates | Partner Overview | AWS Marketplace