Kodaris nets 20x ROI for customers with Amazon QuickSight Embedded

This is a guest post by Tony Zakula, Founder and CEO of Kodaris.

In this post, we discuss how, by embedding Amazon QuickSight into our Kodaris platform, we’ve added advanced self-serve analytics to our capabilities and deliver up to $500,000 per customer in annual savings for our customers depending on the size of their analysis teams, data tooling, and the development needed to make data actionable. This translates to a 20-times return on our QuickSight investment. Kodaris is an organization focused on delivering the supply chain platform of the future. Founded in 2014, Kodaris is built on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and has undergone constant innovation to deliver out-of-the-box, yet customizable, future-ready solutions for its market. As a software as a service (SaaS) platform for distribution and manufacturing, at Kodaris we integrate with any enterprise resource planning (ERP) system.

Solving the supply chain platform challenge for its customers

Kodaris was founded to address a fundamental issue with SaaS supply chain platforms for distribution and manufacturing. Historically, organizations had to force-fit their processes to use a technology solution or rely on multiple or custom-built solutions to track their supply chains end to end. The challenge with these scenarios is a familiar one—legacy and patchwork systems do not scale well. To address this, we built our supply chain platform on AWS from the beginning to allow for innovation, flexibility, and scale.

We address our customers’ needs by following an 80/20 model, in which 80% of the solution is operational out of the box, and 20% can be customized by the user. As a hub for multiple business functions—ERP, commerce, CRM, quote to cash, logistics, and more—we process a lot of critical data for our customers.

When customers began asking for analytics capabilities to understand that data, we initially explored developing these capabilities from scratch. However, that route proved expensive, slow, and limited in terms of what it could deliver. Instead, we opted to bring together offline and online data from multiple sources and overlay powerful analytical tools by using Amazon QuickSight Embedded. This offers our customers all the benefits of near-real-time complex analysis of all the data they want to plug in without having to invest in an analytics team. Even better, this data is presented in straightforward visual formats in the flow of work, within our company’s platform.

QuickSight and Kodaris deliver actionable insights

Custom-built analytics solutions are expensive and don’t necessarily offer all the functionality a customer needs. But unifying data of different kinds, from different sources, and processing that to deliver useful business intelligence in a single platform is a tall order. Turning to QuickSight Embedded gave us and our customers the flexibility to pull in multiple data sources and create speedy, comprehensive insights.

Uniquely integrated with customers’ existing systems and built on a flexible architecture, the Kodaris QuickSight Embedded integration enables customers to use their online and offline data efficiently at scale to drive their business strategy. We record all requests to commerce systems and payment portals to understand what customers are doing online. Combined with ERP order data in the Kodaris platform, this lets our customers understand how offline purchases scale compared to online and what influence a digital presence has compared to those not using the online tools. Built on Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), which stages the data, our platform processes and pulls data into datasets in SPICE—the fast, in-memory QuickSight engine. SPICE (Super-fast, Parallel, In-memory Calculation Engine) then allows customers to quickly analyze and serve detailed visualizations across their business. The solution makes light work of processing a couple million data rows per day, per customer. That’s about 300–500 million data points daily, and we’re just getting started!

However, we act as more than just a technology partner for our customers. Because of our experience in the manufacturing and distribution sector, we dive deep into the challenges and needs of customers and end-users to customize the solution. With QuickSight, we can continue to lead in innovation in digital service, which is extremely important to us.

Kodaris customers save money and time with QuickSight embedded

Embedding analytics through QuickSight enables our customers to do deep analysis, bring in additional datasets, and use non-Kodaris connectors—without having to build out an analytics team or incur development costs on custom-built solutions. This nets Kodaris customers an annual savings of $200,000–$500,000 on average.

Furthermore, it helps customers democratize data analysis, allowing business users to self-serve data process automation and business intelligence. With the capacity to analyze and benchmark external data patterns, business teams can also identify additional revenue opportunities.

Possibly the most exciting feature for business users, however, is the unified view and analysis of offline and online data in near-real time. Compared to historical data, this opens the door to predictive modeling and forecasting.

Using data analytics for future-readiness

By 2025, I expect Kodaris to see massive growth of 200–300% on the back of QuickSight. We expect that over the next couple of years, 80% of our customers will adopt the QuickSight tool internally. In fact, we already have a few of them kicking off internal projects using QuickSight inside Kodaris. We are also starting to develop AI models in Kodaris to feed into QuickSight and other AWS solutions so that we can embed real-time metrics and AI into business operations.

This future-forward strategy is in line with our company’s philosophy: We sell the future because that’s where everybody is going, and QuickSight is helping us meet them there.

About the Author

Tony Zakula is the Founder and CEO of Kodaris. As a practical and deeply experienced technology and business leader, Tony is a lifelong software engineer and entrepreneur. His passion to constantly be learning not only technology, but also accounting, economics, and business, and to learn about how different industries and businesses operate has led to a diverse knowledge that allows him to bring a unique perspective to industry. Understanding a key pain point for customers of enterprise SaaS applications led him to founding Kodaris in 2014, an innovative open SaaS supply chain platform purpose built for the distribution industry to do business the way they do business, and it is continuously enhanced through strong partnership with customers. This constant collaboration between business and technology to solve today’s problems as well as tomorrow’s is the passion for Tony and Kodaris. Tony is always looking for the next big problem to solve together with customers. It is what he gets up to do every day. In his free time, he is even known to write code to relax and for fun.

About Kodaris

Kodaris provides a customizable, future-ready cloud-based platform to serve all sectors of the supply chain with end to-end digital processes. Centering customer needs to build its technology, Kodaris provides comprehensive B2B digital business planning, including innovation strategy, analytics and advertising strategy, and discovery and concept validation. Kodaris works closely with its customers to create a digital experience, working with new, current, or improved business processes to build a competitive advantage.