While companies have made remarkable strides in addressing challenges from the COVID-19 crisis in their supply chain operations, many businesses acknowledge that there is still much ground to cover, according to researchers. In particular, many organizations are still facing barriers to achieving accelerated digitization and implementing advanced planning systems.
The significance of leveraging technology and the cloud is important to maintain a competitive edge. In this blog, we’ll delve into a success story that exemplifies how nClouds and OperationsRx joined forces to revolutionize supply chain management through the power of Amazon Web Services (AWS), ultimately redefining industry standards and driving growth.
From On-Premise to SaaS: The Need for Change
OperationsRx began as an on-premise supply-chain consulting company, relying on Excel modeling and SQL databases for its solutions. As it expanded its customer base, it encountered several challenges.
Managing disparate systems, versioning, and customer constraints on supporting new servers became a nightmare. OperationsRx realized the urgent need to migrate to the cloud to achieve greater scalability, reliability, and faster time to market.
OperationsRx first embarked on its cloud journey by performing a “lift and shift” migration to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). While this move reduced the dependency on customers to provide server space and improved security, it soon realized that it required expert guidance to navigate the complexities of AWS effectively.
This is when it partnered with nClouds, an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner.
Achieving Reliability, Scalability, and Faster Time to Market
nClouds proposed an architecture that included multi-availability zone deployments within an AWS region and an application load balancer in front of Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS). This setup ensured high availability and reliability for the Cloud Analytics platform. By leveraging AWS services such as ECS and Elastic Beanstalk, OperationsRx significantly improved manageability and remote accessibility, enabling its tech team to work more efficiently.
One of the critical objectives for OperationsRx was achieving faster time to market. To help with this goal, nClouds helped implement AWS CodePipeline and AWS CodeDeploy for seamless integration of Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) tooling. Additionally, it used AWS Lambda and AWS Step Functions to create state machines for orchestrating customer database integrations and provisioning. This automation reduced manual intervention and streamlined the deployment process, enabling OperationsRx to reduce the implementation time from months to just a few days.
Overcoming Customization Challenges and Future Prospects
In the world of manufacturing and supply chain planning, customization is inevitable, and each business has its unique requirements. OperationsRx had to address the challenge of managing tenant-specific customizations within its SaaS platform. It found that AWS Step Functions played a pivotal role in allowing it to pick and choose which customizations to deploy, tailoring the application to each customer’s needs.
Looking ahead, OperationsRx aims to further enhance its platform by transitioning from a monolithic architecture to more microservices-based architecture. This will increase the platform’s agility and maintainability. It also plans to leverage Amazon Aurora to reduce its AWS bill further. Already, with its new infrastructure model, OperationsRx has achieved a dramatic reduction in AWS costs, benefiting its customers and fueling growth.
The collaboration between nClouds and OperationsRx is a prime example of how leveraging AWS services can transform a traditional on-premise system into a cutting-edge SaaS application. By migrating to the cloud, OperationsRx achieved enhanced scalability, reliability, and faster time to market, enabling it to stay ahead in the competitive supply chain consulting industry.
With nClouds’ expertise and the power of AWS, OperationsRx successfully navigated the challenges and emerged as a frontrunner in the industry, delivering more value to its customers and paving the way for continued growth and innovation.
Read the full case study and watch a video with nClouds and OperationsRx here.
About nClouds
nClouds is an award-winning Amazon Web Services (AWS) Premier Tier Services Partner focused on helping organizations accelerate innovation. We partner with our customers to migrate, modernize, and manage cloud operations initiatives to support their digital transformation journeys. We provide high-performance consulting and support solutions for every stage of the cloud journey, enabling our customers to improve business agility and innovation velocity, reduce operational costs, and improve workforce efficiencies.
nClouds’ core practices include cloud migration, application modernization, cloud optimization, managed services, and DevOps. Learn more at nclouds.com.
