Mathnasium Partners with Zelusit to Unlock Powerful Business Insights to Improve Operations

Background and Challenge

Better analytics means better management and operational tools

Keenly aware that they weren’t maximizing the wealth of data resources that were available to them, the Mathnasium team wanted a more effective way to harvest and then implement data analytics. With better and more detailed metrics about student enrollment, student retention, student success and student-instructor ratios, the company and its franchisees could improve the quality of their service available to students and parents.

When Zelusit came on board, the tutoring company’s data analytics were executed on an operating system existing on a relational database service (RDS). This meant that wildly different tasks such as writing internal reports and processing customer transactions required access to the same database, slowing down processing times.

“Our database was designed to be more transactional and when we wanted to do complex reporting, the heavy load would affect the performance of our applications, and it would take an unnecessarily long time to process the data. Additionally, it required our development team to spend a substantial amount of time delivering reports to our users,” said Jason Condello, CTO of Mathnasium.

“Understanding how long and how often our students attend and the time it takes them to attain their learning objectives is critical information for us. As a company, and particularly for our franchisees, having up-to-date access to these kinds of comparative metrics is invaluable and can greatly improve the quality of our offering across our learning centers.”

Creating better management and operational tools was a critical step. With the existing architecture, the functionality of any new implementations always had to be set against possible reductions in system performance.

An improved cloud-based analytical system would make it faster and easier for Mathnasium’s IT team to develop new applications and dashboards to take full advantage of available metrics. However, more sophisticated reporting tools required a faster and more robust database architecture that would not increase system latency and hamper performance.

Solution: AWS Redshift Migration

Migrating Data from the RDS SQL Server into AWS Redshift

The Mathnasium operational system was already on the AWS Cloud. A SQL server database on RDS was hosting the data and communicating with the application components.

Zelusit designed and implemented a data lake and data warehouse solution to migrate data with an efficient pipeline to enable a secured analytics environment with optimal performance that would make data analytics more manageable and set a solid foundation for future developments.

To achieve their performance goals, Zelusit used AWS’s Data Migration Service (DMS) to migrate data from the SQL Server RDS into an Amazon S3 Data Lake. We moved the data between different data zones using a combination of AWS Glue, AWS Lambda, and Dynamo DB. The data’s target location was Amazon Redshift, a data warehouse environment that enables performance at any scale.

Moving data from the RDS SQL Server database into the native S3 data lake was a relatively straightforward process, but there were some challenges. “The one thing we had to make sure of was that we captured all the changes on the SQL server database,” noted Elkin Arboleda, Senior Lead Consultant at Zelusit and an AWS Certified Solutions Architect (SAA).

The Zelusit team spent some time looking into the options. They found that change data capture (CDC) was a native feature of the Amazon Data Migration Service. As Arboleda pointed out, “We enabled it, tested it on our data, and it worked well!”

The two teams also worked together to determine which reporting tool would best serve Mathnasium’s needs. For this task, Arboleda and his team discussed which Business Intelligence (BI) solution would be best for Mathnasium when it came time to generate the outputs and visualizations using the metrics from the migrated database. After comparing several options, they decided on Amazon QuickSight.

Condello and Arboleda agreed that staying within the AWS ecosystem offered the most reliable and secure solution. “QuickSight was an easy choice,” noted Jason Condello from Mathnasium, “because it is so much more straightforward if all of our users’ permissions, all of the connections and all of the data through the pipeline remains within the AWS Cloud ecosystem. We appreciate that we already have familiarity with AWS, but more importantly, we see great value in the security and reliability of the platform.”

Continuous Insights and Improved Outcomes

The project has made it much easier for the Mathnasium team to build innovative dashboards and develop new applications. Using new and existing data to modernize processes and generate insights will drive improvements in operations and management across the company.

Zelusit also provided Condello and the Mathnasium team with documentation covering the full scope of their work. Good documentation is critical as it helps ensure that the Mathnasium team has what they need to ensure continuity as they modernize and upgrade their IT systems. The quality of the documentation exceeded expectations and was much better than what they had received after working with other companies.

Most importantly, the continuous integration and continuous deployment pipeline (CI/CD) developed by Zelusit for the company ensures that any new changes will be much easier to deploy. The new foundations of the IT system are designed for future growth. They also make it much easier to integrate machine learning models and vastly improve data analytics.

“Having this new system helps us access powerful insights that were previously too challenging to uncover. The data is now at our fingertips, and we have this great visibility into a wealth of information. If you can’t measure it, you can’t fix and improve it,” said Jason Condello.

Zelusit and AWS Cloud have helped Mathnasium open the door to an exciting future of innovation and growth for the company, students, parents, and franchisees by providing insights and the opportunity to improve operations, management, and pedagogy.