Using Amazon Redshift to Enhance a Leading Accounting Platform with Advanced Analytics Capabilities

Executive Summary

Our client is a leading supplier of accounting, audit, and assurance software. The client wanted an analytical platform that would provide its customers greater insight, through dashboards and reporting, and help improve their productivity and ability to make data-based strategic decisions. Zelusit worked with the client’s Product, Architecture and DevOps teams to understand the use cases, define the architecture, establish a platform that was scalable, highly automated, and deployable to multiple regions.

A Data Lake and a Data Warehouse were the first aspects of the solution and Amazon Redshift was selected as the core analytics platform. The solution helped further enhance the client’s platform with broader, well integrated capabilities that addressed their customers’ increasing need for analytics and improve the client’s competitive positioning in the market.

Customer Challenge

While our client offers a best-in-class operational platform, their customers require increased levels of insight. Selecting an accounting or audit platform is a complex, strategic decision for most customers, and the client needs to continually innovate and improve its offerings to retain its market position.

In keeping with the trending digital transformation needs of its customers, our client wanted to provide increased levels of insight and help improve their customers’ productivity. The idea was to create an analytical platform, including dashboards and reports, highlighting KPIs, trends, exceptions, etc., on everyday business efforts and also to support strategic decisions.

While productivity has always been an important consideration, it has become even more important to measure in the present scenario, with employees working remotely with lower personal interaction between them. Our client wanted to provide its customers with easy visibility into all events and tasks at the individual, group, or organizational level. This will enable customers to optimize their workforce, allocate resources accurately, measure and estimate audit timing, etc.

Why AWS?

The client made a strategic decision to move to the cloud to allow for increased levels of flexibility and agility for both their own and their customers’ businesses. AWS was selected as an ideal partner for two primary reasons – the first being the breadth and maturity of available tools in AWS, and the second, the assurance that comes with working with the world’s largest Cloud platform that supports thousands of companies of all scales and sizes.

Why Zelusit?

While the client had experience in AWS, its focus on other strategic initiatives meant it did not have available resources to establish and deploy the solutions they needed. AWS introduced Zelusit to them as an implementation partner. Zelusit’s vast experience in implementing analytical solutions using AWS meant that we could work closely with the client’s Product team to inform the roadmap and provide strategic inputs on planning additional capabilities.

Customer Solution

The client has thousands of customers and each keeps multiple years’ worth of data, so it was necessary to select a platform that can perform well and scale to accommodate ongoing growth. Considering that each customer has many individuals involved in audits, this platform would be supporting a large number of users, with high peaks considering the seasonal nature of the industry.

Zelusit worked with the client’s Product, Architecture and DevOps teams to understand the use cases, define an architecture, establish a platform that was scalable and highly automated, and deployable in multiple regions matching their global scale.

Solutions need to be driven by business needs and not by technology – what, not the how. Working with the team to understand use cases, both short and longer term, is important to ensure that the solution architecture for the platform covers all planned scenarios and is easily extensible to accommodate future ones. While AWS services are scalable by nature, there are so many options available that attention is warranted at the onset, to select the right services, ensuring the solution is optimal (not just workable) and avoiding future rework.

The Data Lake is the foundation of a modern analytics architecture, so it is only natural that it was the first aspect of the solution. Attention was paid to organizing and optimizing data based on usage, which has a big impact in performance and costs.

Having the right data ingestion strategy makes a big difference in terms of flexibility going forward, including batch and/or near real-time. While data latency requirements and security are of critical importance, one always needs to consider the characteristics of data sources, as it may limit the options available and the level of integration. The client’s data strategy, aligned with the AWS journey, will make it easier to continue providing unprecedent levels of flexibility to its customers.

Some key reasons supporting this decision were:

• Its high performance and concurrency scaling capabilities enable great response time, even during peak times.
• Being a managed service meant that the client’s team could focus on innovating, without worrying about keeping the database up-to-date, available, backed up, etc.
• A modern analytics architecture includes the Data Lake. Redshift Spectrum enables great integration between the DW and Data Lake.
• The ability to resize on the fly means that the client can optimize the platform based on demand, allocating only the required resources, and thus, lowering costs.
• Despite its ability to scale to Petabyte level, its cost per Terabyte is still industry leading and very attractive, inviting organizations to not skimp on keeping or collecting more data.

As in any industry, customers can come in or go at any point in time. With so much data and customers in scope, the support team needs to minimize effort and time required to deal with such processes.

Zelusit developed an event-based framework, using multiple Lambda functions that integrated with existing business processes, thus allowing for automated provisioning, migration or decommissioning of environments.

Benefits

The solution will be instrumental in further enhancing the client’s industry leading platform with broader, well-integrated capabilities, helping them address their customers’ increasing need for analytics, making them more productive and competitive.

This more robust, advanced platform will enable the client’s solutions to continue leading the industry and increase their attractiveness to new customers. The client’s customers will now have a one-stop shop where core operational capabilities are supplemented by analytical ones. The advanced reporting, analytical, and forecasting capabilities will provide their customers with better visibility of their own customers and operations.

Small customers, in particular, which do not have well-developed analytics capabilities internally, are bound to rely on our client’s platform for insights. The improved platform will provide them with additional information derived using Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, which will provide more accurate recommendations for scheduling, workload optimization, and improve exception identification.

The platform will also evolve to provide firms with insights from unstructured data, such as contracts, which commonly force the use of manual processes. This platform will enable the large firms, with multiple offices and typically operating across geographies, to monitor KPIs, compare performance and gain insights across geographies or holistically at the enterprise-level. It will even allow data and insights to be shared with partner firms.

Some of these firms, with their own analytical capabilities can benefit from more data exchange options and can combine both sets of analytical capabilities via APIs that our client will make available. It will also provide opportunities for the client to gain sharable insights, while preserving the privacy of their customers.

Next Steps

The platform is evolving with ad-hoc capabilities and further improvements in reporting and visualization are planned. Machine Learning models through SageMaker will be used to recommend certain actions, highlight risks or exceptions, etc. Discussions are also in progress with the client on data curation and governance initiatives to ensure that their data is trusted, well-understood, and fit-for-purpose.

About the Client

Our client is a leading supplier of accounting, audit, and assurance software. The organization operates in 100+ countries and has been developing award-winning software for use by governments, professional and corporate clients for over 30 years. The client prides itself on being an innovator and for years, it has supported thousands of firms and provided them with unbeatable levels of flexibility and customization.

About Zelusit

Zelusit Corporation transforms businesses into digital leaders. Since 2000, Zelusit has been helping global organizations accelerate innovation, improve operational excellence, and create unforgettable customer experiences, all with the power of their data. By providing cutting edge Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, Cloud, Digital and Governance services and solutions, Zelusit helps enterprises leverage data that they can control and trust, connecting them to their customers – and their customers to the world.

Zelusit has been helping companies for the past 20 years, across various industries in multiple lines of business realize value in their data, with our award-winning expertise, proven methodologies, and highly qualified team. Let Zelusit help your company achieve data quality excellence.