IMV
Business Intelligence Empowered by AWS Data Management Solution
The former infrastructure of IMV lacked the scalability required to accommodate the growing volumes of data and the increasing demand for business intelligence and analytics.
Industry
Manufacturing, Trading and Distributing
Technology
OVERVIEW
Established in 1996, International Minh Viet Joint Stock Company (IMV) is a prominent Vietnamese distribution company which specializes in Photo Imaging & Printing, Baby Care, Cosmetics, and Medical Imaging Systems. IMV has offices in all major cities with an expansive distribution network covering traditional, modern, and e-commerce channels. This allows IMV to broaden its presence and provide services to all 63 provinces in Vietnam. IMV’s ambition is to reshape Vietnam’s consumer landscape by providing top-quality products to end consumers, ultimately enhancing their modern, convenient lifestyle.
KEY CHALLENGES
IMV used to grapple with a complex data landscape, in which data spread across diverse sources such as Oracle Database on AWS and numerous spreadsheets. This data fragmentation posed a significant challenge as it hindered the company’s ability to consolidate and access a unified view of the company’s data. Another pressing challenge for IMV was the heavy reliance on manual reporting processes, which not only consumed valuable resources but also introduced the risk of errors in reporting, posing serious implications for decision-making.
Furthermore, the former infrastructure of IMV lacked the scalability required to accommodate the growing volumes of data and the increasing demand for business intelligence and analytics.
Timeliness of insights was another critical challenge: its old setup could not provide the agility required for swift decision-making, potentially impacting IMV’s competitiveness in the market. As IMV continues its growth trajectory, such limitations of the existing current systems made it imperative for IMV to acquire a scalable, cost-effective infrastructure that could adapt to their evolving data needs without incurring excessive operational overhead.
SOLUTION
The focus of the IMV project was to build data lakes for processing data and transform them into comprehensive, insightful PowerBI reports, based on which IMV can make informed decisions that contribute to growth objectives. After careful consideration of IMV’s requirement and its existing IT infrastructure, Renova Cloud proposed a data management solution that relied on AWS Glue for Extraction – Transformation – Load (ETL); Amazon S3 for storing data; and Amazon Athena for querying necessary data needed by BI tools. Furthermore, Renova also employed AWS Glue Data Catalog for catalog management in order to achieve better integration between the selected AWS services.
The IMV solution was implemented in three phases with clearly defined tasks and deliverables. First, Renova Cloud set up a data lake for the client to store raw data ingested from their existing Oracle database hosted on Amazon EC2. Second, we aggregated this raw data to create a data source for Power BI, where raw data were duplicated and transformed into data types required by its destination processing tools. Finally, Renova used AWS Glue Crawler to determine schema, create tables, and write metadata in the AWS Glue Data Catalog. Based on this central metadata store, Amazon Athena would subsequently query processed data in S3 to create different views. As a result, Power BI would use the outputs from these views as a data source to build insightful data reports such as Marketing Reports, Sales MT Reports & Sales GT Reports, or Inventory reports.
As the region’s leading AWS partner, compliance with AWS best practices is always one of Renova Cloud’s top priorities when delivering solutions and the IMV project was not an exception. The overall architecture and operation of the IMV solution were fashioned and deployed in adherence with AWS Account Governance best practices such as informing the client’s team on when to use and not to use the root user for workload-related activities or activating MFA on the root account.
Client’s employee empowerment was also an important aspect of the IMV project thanks to the real-near-time alert mechanism based on pre-built workflows configured within AWS Step Functions. Specifically, In the event of any workflow step failure, a notification will be sent to the responsible administrator for immediate remediation. Thanks to this near real-time alert mechanism, the IMV team could proactively prevent unwanted interruptions when one or more elements could not make it to their intended destination.
BENEFITS
- Thanks to the AWS Data Management solution, IMV could now gain valuable insights from existing raw data, enabling the company to stimulate growth and streamline operations
- The IMV solution operates on a serverless service, which allows IMV to minimize operational expense as they would only have to pay for what they actually used
- The sizing for AWS Glue and AWS Lambda was carefully studied and selected based on IMV’s estimated usage requirements to maximize ROI
