Integrated Waste Management and Data Systems Innovator

Posted by Encora on May 24, 2023 12:28:08 PM
Encora’s approach drove significant improvements across the client’s eCommerce KPI dashboard.

Topics: Product Engineering & Development, Digital Experience, Quality Engineering, Product management, Cloud Services, Azure, DevSecOps, Energy & Utilities

Industry Context

The company wanted to understand their data better and exit non-profitable BUs. The legacy data warehouse system was an amalgamation of various Commercial Off-the-Shelf (COTS) products over which the client had little control. As a result, business intelligence and analytics needed to be improved. With the demand for greater customization, the need for the hour was to have tools for developing, testing and delivering software changes at speed and quality. 
Waste management

Client Challenge

Some of the client's topmost challenges were: 

  • Migrating and managing data from multiple third-party systems. 
  • Bringing together customer and vendor data scattered across different systems. 
  • Relying heavily on tools like Excel and Smartsheet, which required manual efforts. 
  • Tracking growth and profit when data was recorded in multiple systems.
  • Onboarding new customers and vendors, as well as delays and loss of business. 
  • Provisioning on-prem infrastructure for peak load, resulting in high costs. 
  • Lacking a non-prod ecosystem (Develop, QA, UAT & Regression) that mirrors the production ecosystem, leading to longer issue resolution times. 
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QT Challenge

Approach

  • Product Management:Understand client's cloud migration needs and prepare a detailed roadmap. Responsibilities include release planning, product backlog management & UAT support. 
  • Cloud Services: Migrating on-premises facility source ecosystem to Azure. 
  • Platform Modernization: Re-engineering the code to utilize Azure PaaS offerings like Azure Key Vault, Azure Service Bus, etc. 
  • Product Engineering & Development: Prepare target cloud blueprint, identify components to re-engineer for cloud, and perform the required PoC; re-engineer the code to utilize Cloud PaaS offerings. 
  • DevOps: Built DevOps toolchain, scripted the infrastructure, and bridged the gap between non-prod & prod ecosystem, ensuring seamless delivery to all non-prod & prod servers. 
  • Quality Engineering: Created the smoke, regression automation test suites, and integrated them with the DevOps pipeline.
  • Digital Experience: Re-engineering existing product suite to rich UI using Bootstrap, Angular QT. 
QT Approach

Why Azure?

  • The company's legacy product was built on .Net stack, and the client is familiar with the Azure PaaS offerings.
  • Encora is instrumental in rebuilding and replacing the current ecosystem, an amalgamation of various COTS-based sub-systems to perform day-to-day activities on waste recycling management.  
 
Why Azure_

Azure Solution

Implementing Azure helped the client by: 

  • Utilizing the Azure DevOps pipeline, Infrastructure as Code to maintain a standard infrastructure across environments (Dev, QA, UAT, Regression & Production). 
  • Using the Azure Key Vault to manage application secrets and configs. 
  • Using Azure Active Directory to enable two-factor authentication.  
  • Utilizing Azure Kubernetes Services to dynamically handle preventive maintenance workloads and seasonal spikes. 
  • Monitoring the product ecosystem in real time using Azure Application Insights and Azure Monitor. 

 Primary Azure Services: Azure Active Directory, Azure Active Directory B2C, Azure Service Bus, Azure Kubernetes services, Azure API Manager, Azure Key Vault, Azure Blob Storage, Send Grid, Azure SQL Database, Azure Monitor, Azure Application Insights  

Azure Solution 3

Results

As a result of introducing Azure, the client could: 

  • Reduce the infrastructure cost by 20% by enabling dynamic scaling. 
  • Lower the overall time for deployment by 20% with Azure Pipelines. 
  • Address both static and dynamic security needs by implementing DevSecOps using Azure CI/CD.  
  • Help to seamlessly message exchange and implement eventual data consistency with Azure Service Bus. 
  • Track and handle the unhandled exceptions and ensure ultra-high availability with Azure Monitor and Azure App insights. 

 

QT  Results
QT metric -20%

Reduced infrastructure cost

QT metric -20%

Reduced deployment time