Integrated Facilities and Procurement Solutions Provider

Industry: HiTech

Delivery Center: Costa Rica

Integrated Facilities and Procurement Solutions Provider

Posted by Encora on May 24, 2023 12:27:24 PM

Encora’s approach drove significant improvements across the client’s eCommerce KPI dashboard.

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

Industry Context

The client offers facilities management and procurement solutions for retail, financial services, logistics, and healthcare sectors. They sought flexibility in their approach, aiming to use select features from their flagship facilities management product and integrate these with their current ERP suite. This approach would allow them to choose tools that best fit their requirements. With client expectations around customization growing, there's an amplified need for tools that enable swift, high-quality software development and testing.

Client Challenge

The transition from on-premises to cloud was complex.
New customer onboarding spanned 4-6 weeks, hindering rapid business integration.
The system struggled to scale dynamically for seasonal spikes.
On-prem provisioning for peak loads escalated costs.
Differences between non-prod and prod ecosystems caused unexpected release issues.
The rudimentary DevOPS setup relied heavily on the release management team.
Releasing new versions became a significant event, demanding full-team engagement.
There was an evident deficiency in support for ultra-high availability.

Approach

Product Management: Developed a deep understanding of clients' cloud migration needs, crafting a meticulous roadmap. This encompassed release planning, product backlog oversight, and UAT support.
Cloud Services: Executed a seamless migration of the on-premises facility source ecosystem to Azure.
Platform Modernization: rPrioritized code reengineering to harness Azure PaaS tools, including Azure Key Vault and Azure Service Bus.
Product Engineering & Development: Established a target cloud blueprint, identified critical components for cloud reengineering, and conducted essential PoCs. This involved adapting the code for cloud PaaS integration.
DevOps: Established a comprehensive DevOps toolchain, scripted infrastructure protocols, and bridged discrepancies between non-prod and prod ecosystems, ensuring fluid deliveries across all environments.
Quality Engineering: Instituted smoke and regression automated testing suites and assimilated them within the DevOps pipeline.
Digital Experience: Upgraded the existing product suite with a richer UI, leveraging Bootstrap and Angular technologies.

Why Azure?

The FMPilot was built on a .Net stack and Azure was the natural cloud choice.
Encora has been instrumental in building and managing the FMPilot ecosystem for the last 10+ years.
Encora also has the required expertise in reengineering and migrating a large-scale on-prem monolith enterprise product to the cloud.

Azure Solution

Azure helped optimize and secure the cloud infrastructure by:

Utilizing Azure DevOps pipeline, Infrastructure as Code to maintain a standard infrastructure across environments (Dev, QA, UAT, Regression & Production).
Managing application secrets and configs using Azure Key Vault.
Using Azure Active Directory to enable two-factor authentication.
Utilizing VM Scale sets to dynamically scale the compute to handle preventive maintenance workloads and seasonal spikes.
Deploying the product across regions to support ultra-high availability.
Enabling real-time monitoring of the product ecosystem using Azure Application Insights and Azure Monitor.

Primary Azure Services: VM Scale Sets, Azure Active Directory, Azure Service Bus, Azure Load Balancer, Azure Front Door, Azure Key Vault, Azure Blob Storage, Send Grid, SQL over VM, Azure Monitor, Azure Application Insights

Results

As a result of introducing Azure, the client:

Reduced the infrastructure cost by 20% by enabling dynamic scaling.
Reduced new customer onboarding time by 50% (from 4 to 6 weeks to 1-2 weeks).
Increased application availability time.
Enhanced real-time monitoring of application infrastructure.

Infrastructure cost

Integrated Facilities and Procurement Solutions Provider

Integrated Facilities and Procurement Solutions Provider

Industry Context

Client Challenge

Approach

Why Azure?

Azure Solution

Results

Infrastructure cost

Customer Onboarding Time

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