Our Client
Operating in the UAE since 1960, this family business group stands as one of the largest and most diversified. It engages in seven distinct industry sectors, including foods, resources, properties, construction, energy, mobility, and ventures. Headquartered in Dubai, the group extends its operations to over 20 countries, spanning the globe across these seven sectors. With a workforce of around 28,000 individuals, it has established a significant presence in various industries.
Problem Statement
As a component of a comprehensive transformation effort throughout the group, all the affiliated companies within the group underwent a transition from their outdated ERP applications to a contemporary SAS ERP platform. This program encompassed 10 group companies characterized by intricate and diverse business operations. With the transformation of ERP applications into SAS applications, the group aimed to migrate and store their historical data on a dedicated platform, facilitating subsequent analytics and compliance requirements. Business approval was sought for the accuracy and usability of the migrated data to ensure its suitability for further utilization with visualization tools.
The Solution
The Amazon Web Services (AWS) and DataPhi team were chosen to deliver a solution. Following a phased approach organized into three stages based on business priorities and the grouping of similar ERP applications, data from all ten distinct ERP applications was integrated into the AWS data lake based on S3. AWS Glue played a key role in handling data engineering and transformation during this process. A medallion architecture, consisting of three layers, was implemented to store and move data according to business requirements. The data elements were categorized into functional datasets, technical datasets, and backend (DB objects) related datasets. The migration of these datasets was carried out using dedicated buckets within AWS S3.
The functional datasets underwent additional transformation using AWS Glue and were subsequently loaded into AWS Redshift as a data warehouse. Business rules were applied to make the data more user-friendly for business validation purposes. Grid-based Power BI visuals were then created, enabling the business to assess the accuracy and completeness of the migrated data.
Benefits
The implementation of the solution effectively catered to the functional and compliance requirements of the business regarding historical data by consolidating them into a unified data platform with a Power BI visualization interface. This data migration initiative resulted in a significant 55% cost savings for the group in terms of data storage and compute expenses, leveraging AWS services.
