Case Study | From Data Chaos to Clarity: The Amazon QuickSight Solution

Amazon QuickSight revolutionizes business approaches to data analysis.

The Mindex cloud team worked in close collaboration with a working capital financing provider to help them leverage their big data. With the help of Amazon QuickSight, they were able to quickly and conveniently analyze their data with dynamic dashboards and easily share their discoveries with colleagues on a regular basis.

Opportunity

Our client generates a daily flash report for business guidance, enabling them to measure how well their business is performing.

Previously, all this work was handled by a single power user responsible for handling all the daily report information. This exhausting report came in the form of an Excel mashup file full of data and formulas from various places. The power user’s responsibility was to keep track of and update the spreadsheet as soon as invoices were paid and sent out. Needless to say, it was a labor-intensive task!

As part of our client's efforts to eliminate this tedious manual task (so staff could focus valuable time on other business-critical responsibilities) and provide user-friendly reports and meaningful visualizations, they sought a business intelligence solution.

Solution

We recommended our client use QuickSight – an Amazon Web Services (AWS) tool that provides AI-powered recommendations for metrics, chart types, and visualizations based on the data provided. This could help them draw deeper insights from their data faster than ever before, as QuickSight easily identifies valuable connections, trends, or outliers.

Our client previously had their data stored in a third-party relational database, but this was not sufficient to reach the company’s goal of rapid, secure access to reporting information. Our team migrated its operational system – which handles and supports its factoring offerings – to an Amazon EC2 virtual Windows server running Microsoft SQL Server.

We have established security permissions and set up a private connection so that the QuickSight instance can securely connect to the database, preventing outside access. As they both sit within the same AWS ecosystem, our client can easily connect to their SQL server from QuickSight. After migrating its critical factoring software to the cloud, our client is now in control of its data and reaping the benefits of cloud computing.

Our cloud team can now provide our client with clean data sets, allowing them to view trends through dashboards and keep tabs on progress through a variety of reports. All these capabilities are easily managed within QuickSight.

Develop Interactive Data Visualizations

No more ugly spreadsheets! With interactive dashboards, our client can now access and view all their data easily and see how their business is performing.

Share Dashboards & Reports in Real-Time

Our client now has access to various dashboards and PDF reports that can be shared daily in an easy-to-read format within the organization.

Save Time & Resources

No more manual entry and multi-step processes are needed to generate business reports. As a result, time and resources can now be reallocated to other business tasks.

Enhanced Performance for Large Datasets

QuickSight allows for faster calculations and slicing and dicing of data. After moving all of our client's storage to the cloud and using QuickSight, the possibilities are endless.

Gain Business Insights

Our client can easily take action based on the insights provided through intuitive features with just a few clicks.

Curious to learn more about how to put your data to work?

It all starts with a chat! By building an understanding of your current architecture and data strategy (we help with that too), our team of cloud experts will have you on your way to achieving deeper, actionable insights that can help your organization quickly adapt to changing business and customer needs.