Our client’s backstory
Our client is a market leader in sleep innovation and bed manufacturing, powering the sleeping experience with smart bed technology to enhance users' sleep and mental well-being.
Besides serving 1+ million satisfied customers, the company also counts thousands of employees who are in charge of tracking all the different processes, from sales to delivery, and all operations are run on several large enterprise systems that track inventory, transportation, consumer insights, and more. Each of these systems, however, solves a narrow domain of problems and functions as an isolated silo of data.
Looking to connect all the source systems into one well-designed platform, the company started making POCs in Microsoft Azure to explore options. With time and gaining enough experience in the Azure space, they gained the confidence to set up a new architecture that would unify all the separate systems into a consolidated and well-built platform and enable advanced BI.
As Klika has been a long-term tech partner to the retail market leader, our team was tasked to develop a BI cloud solution to improve business efficiency, operations, and employee efficiency.
The challenges
One of the first challenges was to connect and integrate all the different data sources into a single platform. Each system had its interface, and the data was organized in a specific way.
Many early POCs quickly proved their benefit, and business teams started relying on them as a source for their BI and reports, even before they were officially production-ready. This required precise planning regarding the timing and migration of the systems due to fundamental architecture changes so they could be officially released to production. Many databases needed to be cloned, cleansed and made ready to be integrated with the new back end.
In addition, there were multiple technological challenges – while the Azure stack provides many out-of-the-box solutions, in certain areas of automation and monitoring, it was necessary to provide custom scripting to connect different Azure products.
Klika solution
One of the first steps was to inventory the existing POCs and analyze how they were connected and who was using them. Legacy systems needed to be removed, and new ones had to be set up correctly.
Access to specific resources needed to be revised, and we chose to synchronize Azure Active Directory with the on-prem Windows Active Directory. As the platform gained more credibility with different business teams within the company, additional requests started coming in, and to deliver business value quickly, the team needed to step up on agility.
This is where the DevOps expertise came into play, as several release and deployment processes were automated using Azure DevOps. CI/CD pipelines were implemented to automate the flow from the git commit through testing to deployment to non-prod environments. Git flow was established for new projects, following best practices regarding pull requests and quality gates. We implemented monitoring and alerting by default for all deployed systems. When Azure's out-of-the-box solutions were not enough, custom scripts were written to enable complete monitoring of business-critical systems and their performance.
Klika DevOps experts also helped the team achieve new standards in automation and quality of monitoring and alerting. Having previously worked in the silos of separate enterprise systems, in-house teams also quickly benefited from the DevOps ability to quickly triage integration problems and solve them with the help of appropriate domain experts.
After the in-house teams finished the initial POCs, the Klika team worked side-by-side to establish the newly created data processing platform on solid foundations that allowed for easier future development.
Results
The new platform eliminated redundancies, reduced duplication of software implementation, and improved performance and automation processes, accounting for a significant cost reduction in maintenance and upkeep expenses.
The new BI system improved transparency, internal processes, employee efficiency, and overall results, helping the company leverage new tech solutions to speed up and align all their operations and provide better insights at all company levels.
Technology stack
.NET stack , Azure SQL, Azure Functions, Azure App Services , Azure API management, Azure ADF, Azure VM, Azure Eventhub, Azure Batch, Azure Storage, Azure Automation, Azure Application Insights, Azure Monitor
