Migration to Modern Cloud Architecture

A company had to migrate large data assets from Notes Domino to a modern cloud architecture.
Having analyzed its application portfolio, around 1,000 of their legacy Notes apps were targeted for migration. The remainder would be decommissioned. The development team defined two strategies, depending on the nature of the applications—migrate all capabilities, or migrate data only for view.

The company selected two database technologies to support structured and unstructured data. Structured data was migrated to SQL Server, and unstructured data (or “knowledge”) was migrated to MarkLogic Server, an enterprise-class NoSQL database. The company selected OutSystems as its application development platform on top of both databases.

They were able to quickly integrate both databases and any other systems that they required. They were easily able to easily deliver consistent and engaging user experiences across all device formats. The organization’s IT team collaborated to establish and upskill its new OutSystems development team.

They used agile development as their reference model to structure the team and its processes. The OutSystems platform standardized their development approach, and they were then able to transfer the skills and processes to other agile teams across the company.

Sales Agent Portal

A healthcare company’ s development team finished its very first OutSystems project in 8 weeks instead of the expected 8 months with traditional coding. With obstacles removed, the development team has deployed a multitude of solutions – 4x faster and at one-fourth the cost.

Given the urgency of this first project, they formed a co-delivery team with OutSystems Professional Services. They provided a scrum team, including an architect and three developers. The healthcare giant provided product owners, a project manager, UX designers, and copywriters.

Since the project was urgent, they created a co-delivery team with OutSystems developers. They got a scrum team, an architect and 3 developers. The company already had product owners, a project manager, copywriters, and UX designers.

The solution was up and running within 8 weeks rather than the 8 months quoted by traditional developers. The solution helped every sales agent get personalized access to the product and pricing information of their territories. The solution was a hit among the sales people, especially because they got it sooner than expected.

Customer Service Portal

An old, well-established bank aimed to provide consistent experiences across all their branches and touchpoints. COTS were clearly not helpful as they were too rigid, costly, or difficult to customize to their specific needs.

With OutSystems, the bank has totally transformed its onboarding process, permitting new customers to create their accounts within minutes on a mobile app. When the pandemic put pressure on their customers’ finances, the bank immediately launched an initiative that offered crucial financial support to people in need.

The very first project taken up by the bank was spearheaded by three OutSystems developers, and revolved around the digital onboarding experience for the bank’s customers. Making a new account was a lengthy process that would take a long time to complete while the document checks would happen in the background. Now, their customers are able to open their accounts and them through the mobile banking services within minutes.Their development team completed the project within three months.

During the pandemic, the bank hired only two OutSystems developers to build a portal that could fastrack interest free loans, credit increases, installment payments and more to help those who were in need.

Rapid Automation

A well-known bottle manufacturing company wanted to expand its processes to local manufacturers, and like with any quick expansion, they faced challenges. The firm recognized many processes that had to be automated or streamlined as the increased workload could not be managed manually.

Despite this, the company struggled to automate processes due to lack of development talent and the amount of time traditional coding required. They were also held back by the constant changes in the coding platforms. That’s when they came across Microsoft Power Platform.

As Power Apps is an Azure-based platform, it aligned well with the firm’s SAP system. Their team was also pleased with the simplicity of Power Apps.

The results of automation were fantastic. Hours of verification of inventories now took a few seconds; so did checking other order data. Power Apps also meant fewer errors, quick deliveries and greater client satisfaction.

Security and Governance

A major clothing retailer revolutionized the way they made apps by involving citizen developers to create their own by introducing the Power Apps platform. Employees from all departments quickly caught on and soon the company had nearly 1500 apps with over 30,000 users.

With such an expansive framework of apps, they realized they had to take on a more controlled approach towards development. That’s when they decided to build a Center of Excellence (CoE).

It was led by 4 employees with varying levels of experience in development on Power Apps. They were very clear on the business goals of the CoE. They set up the CoE with 3 core aspects: administration, governance, plus the processes to establish the guardrails of the platform.

They controlled employee access to resources like apps, connections and flows on the platform with a tiered structure. Each tier had a different security requirement or target group. Access was granted to the appropriate groups.

With this, they inspired employees to create even more apps as the foundation of security was taken care of.

Asset Protection App

A healthcare retailer wanted to ensure that the products customers want are on the shelves. They run a comprehensive asset protection program to help prevent theft and loss at stores. They work with the entire operational team, from store managers and district managers all the way up the leadership chain, helping them understand loss measures and how to use them appropriately. They do store visits and work with store managers to streamline loss reduction processes and mitigate both internal and external theft.

In the past, the process for store visits varied from employee to employee within the asset protection program, but in general, it involved inefficiencies and redundancy. It felt like they were doing a lot of double and triple work—writing things down in the store, then later transferring them to a Word document and then an email.

They decided to remove the process so that stores—and, ultimately, their customers—would have what they needed sooner. The company built a custom Asset Protection mobile app using Microsoft Power Apps, a low-code development platform designed to help companies quickly create solutions to business challenges.

With the Asset Protection app on the phone,they have all of their store visit data, analytical tools, and results in one place. They no longer need to pull information from five different locations. During store walk-throughs, they enter notes, and when I’m finished, they can share the results immediately with the store manager.

The Asset Protection app became even more useful when they combined it with Microsoft Teams. Using Teams and the Asset Protection app together, helped them have one place to do everything—pull analytics, look up store visit data, share documents and reports, and communicate with each other.

Field Management

A construction firm was actively looking for new ways to up their operational efficiency by automating repetitive tasks. They wanted to automate everything right from creating the plans to the completion of their construction projects. With Power Automate, every repetitive process could be automated, be it remotely controlling machinery, workflows in ERP, automating invoices, document management, cost-to-time reports, area surveys drones, and VR for project planning or training.

Their development team basically built them a seamless, custom workflow solution, which translated to a considerable boost in operational flow efficiency. Their workforce now has more scope for agility and productivity. Power Automate is being leveraged for Workforce Automation as well. Their field workers needed a seamless flow of multiple processes for project management and Microsoft Flow did it for them.

Supply Chain Management

The manufacturing process automation is in great demand today. Manufacturers are using process and workflow not only in production lines but in automating deliveries, orders, purchasing and more. Thanks to Power Automate, one such manufacturing company was able to cut down production waste, enhance product quality, response time, and more. Right from procurement to production, order processing to procedures, Power Automate can be used.

It helps with tracking data, document processing, emails for easier supplier communication management, placing orders, tracking, and delivery processes, workflows involved in distribution and logistics, and quickly responds to customers’ questions even beyond office hours.

Data reveals that more than 2000 hours of manual work can be saved by executing automation in manufacturing procedures.

Responsive Customer-Facing Solutions

BFSI institutions are one of the rapid adopters of business process management automation solutions. Transforming core business operations is now a top priority for financial institutions and insurance companies. An old and established bank saved 20-25% of the cost with BPA & RPA.

Using Microsoft Power Automate, the company is able to automate business processes like validating processes and giving customers faster responses, accounts payable, employee, customer data push/pull, loan application capturing, application of formulas, orchestrating processes, application of business rules.

Unifying Disparate Data Sources

In the FMCG industry, recognizing issues in production early is important to ensure that demands are met and the overall financial targets are achieved.

Still, to get meaningful insights, users had to deal with large amounts of detailed data, multiple spreadsheets and depend on disparate data to get answers to even simple (but crucial) questions.

How valuable are these insights? Strong insight is required to figure out how to spend the budget effectively and invest in infrastructure, to identify opportunities and outdo the competition. The top decision makers use precise, rather than speculative, insights to make good investments.

A company took multi-source and multi-format, tabular data, and changed it into dynamic, engaging visualisations with Power BI. Users have insights, which in turn lead to better tracking, problem-solving and finally, investment.

Users could simply find the total production YTD as a benchmark of progress against targets as well as by the current month, region, and product. They could view the production values and quality glitches across the unit, recognizing issues even before they arose.

They could also monitor target variances for quality goods and below par goods. They could then make meaningful comparisons and quality across areas, products, plants and time frames.

Customer Data Analysis

In any organization, Sales is the primary revenue generator that covers all expenses, and analyzing these sales is of utmost importance regardless of whether it is achieved easily or with difficulty. And Power BI helps organizations study and identify patterns in their sales to glean meaningful insights.

A regular sales analysis involves studying the sales made by the company over a period of time. Many of them are done weekly, monthly or quarterly. It helps them understand where they are doing better and their areas of improvement.

It also gives them an understanding of the products their clients purchase and lets them dig deeper into customer behaviour. They can also detect patterns in their lead conversions and dropoffs. All of these pointers let them streamline their sales process.

Sales reporting dashboard has numerous benefits for the C level executives of an organization. It offers them insights on the sales and target volumes, patterns, and distribution among material, time, region, distributors and zonal manager.

It also helps them analyse the target funnel metrics and recognize positive and negative sales in different dimensions and kinds of visuals. They can also identify the best and worst performers from them.

Property Management

A real estate company had to go through endless income tax statements to make any sense of them and gain useful insights. They needed answers to critical questions about their business like what is the contrast between income statements every year, what’s the overall gross profit vs gross profit figures for properties in the US vs. Canada over a span?

Plus the firm needed better quality data to make crucial investment decisions like the regions for the best expansion opportunities, and the country that could yield the most profits. They needed to find out if expansion was a wise decision.

When their CPA firm understood their dilemma, they came up with a solution – Power BI. They wanted to offer it to the real estate company as a service.

They used the platform to get their once static income statements rolling again, offering insights and the ability to explore the information to make important financial decisions.

All the stakeholders can now see the high quality data via a single pane. The DLP managers and their team can simply zoom in to every level of a property’s income statements and compare them over time.

They can also find the variances in Cost of Sales and other values. They can also determine which area is ready for expansion and which may not be viable.

Query Resolution

A food delivery company was facing issues with their legacy data warehouse. It was frequently related to memory leaks, which could cause queries to stall or be blocked. The issue occurred during peak morning hours, grinding business to a halt.

In addition to troubleshooting the frequent memory leaks, their Data Platform team had to support the infrastructure by doing capacity planning, monitoring and upgrades, and managing authentication and authorization.

The Data Platform team needed a higher-performing and more stable cloud solution that relieved it from managing the infrastructure.

The company worked with Snowflake on a POC with 50 users. The POC immediately demonstrated higher performance and reliability, leading the business to migrate fully to Snowflake Cloud Data Platform from their legacy system.

Now, Snowpipe continuously ingests data from their various business systems into Snowflake, augmenting ongoing batch data loads.

Once ingested, all data is available as tables to their data analysts, who use the data to create dashboards and reports.

In addition to this, their platform uses data in Snowflake to do prediction modelling using the R and Python programming languages. In each city, the platform performs complex calculations and modelling based on demand (food orders) and supply (how many hours drivers log).

If there is a mismatch between supply and demand, the system may nudge drivers from low demand to high demand areas, enabling more of them to accept delivery requests. It’s a complex and real-time forecasting model that uses data in Snowflake as the foundation.

Large-Scale Customer Intelligence

An energy and gas supplier wanted to provide its market sector with innovative products based on customer intelligence, but faced one major bottleneck in their Business Intelligence system.

They required a platform that would easily scale to meet the company’s data demands, enabling fast data access for both its customers and internal stakeholders.

The energy company’s legacy infrastructure was a significant bottleneck for accessing timely business intelligence. It often took weeks or months for business users to access the data they needed, and the IT teams spent additional time tweaking the existing process, rather than analysing data that would feed valuable insights back to users.

Not only was speed and power an issue, but the ability to easily and securely share select data sets with third parties and partners was also crucial. That wasn’t possible with Oracle’s solution nor was it easy to ascertain who was accessing data or ensure compliance with industry-wide regulations.

They migrated to Snowflake, which quickly became a core pillar of its IT strategy. Snowflake’s performance offers the company a competitive edge by providing the speed and elasticity its IT teams require. Snowflake breaks down data barriers and makes insights shareable and accessible across the entire organisation, creating a single source of truth.

By collecting data on customers’ consumption habits, the company can forecast future consumption and get a data-informed overview of customer portfolios, enabling data-driven decisions.

Snowflake enables them to scale compute up during periods of peak usage. Additionally, Snowflake provides elasticity across the company’s data stack, so it can adjust its infrastructure in line with usage, and at a cheaper cost than before.

IT teams can now access data in near real time for online payments and location data, which is critical. Before Snowflake, large-scale data sharing took weeks to process. With Snowflake, it can be done in a matter of seconds, including quick and secure data sharing to third parties and partners.

Data Elasticity

A US based restaurant chain had an on-premises data warehouse that could not scale to meet increasing demands. They couldn’t provide business users with the right infrastructure to give them what they were asking for.

Increasing capacity was expensive and time consuming, requiring the IT team to add hardware and software, as well as perform database administration and tuning. During the Super Bowl, the chain’s busiest day of the year, its data volumes can sometimes triple. With its legacy data warehouse, the team did not have unified real-time analytics during the Super Bowl due to limited scalability.

The IT team implemented a Snowflake Data Cloud proof of concept that rapidly demonstrated positive results. Snowflake’s near-instant elasticity immediately addressed the previous scalability issues. The advanced analytics team could perform ad-hoc queries, something that the previous system could not provide.

On-premises data platform migrations used to take four to five months. With Snowflake, they had space provisioned, up, and running in a day. The entire migration was complete in a few weeks.

The ingestion of data into Snowflake was assisted by Snowpipe, which loads data from files as soon as they’re available in a stage.