Altron Group uses AWS Data Lake to better understand customer success and operational efficiencies

The business challenge

The Altron Group is South Africa’s oldest IT company, and looks after a number of operating companies, such as Netstar, Altron Digital Business, Altron Healthtech and Altron Document Solutions. It has been difficult to measure each company collectively on perspectives such as customer success, organic growth and operational efficiencies, and this has meant that it is not easy to identify issues early or share successful tactics across all the group companies.

In order to address these concerns, it became apparent that it was necessary to bring the many data sources used by all operating companies (such as Dynamics 365, Oracle Hyperion Financial Management, Astea, Hubspot and Remedy) into one consolidated repository, and build analytics such as scorecards, dashboards and other reports that allow high-level as well as highly-detailed analysis of company performance.

This project was one of the first initiated by Altron Group COO Collin Govender, previous CEO of Altron Systems Integration and Altron Karabina (both now part of Altron Digital Business), and is being led by Hardus Steyn, Executive for Information Systems at Altron Digital Business.

What was delivered

Altron Digital Business has completed the first phase of the data project, and has moved the Dynamics 365 and Hyperion financials and sales domain data into the data lake and the AWS data warehouse. Numerous reports have already been created to support both the operational teams as well as the Group leadership team.

The solution made extensive use of AWS Glue for moving and manipulating data sourced from the various Altron transactional systems into Amazon S3 storage. The data was then consolidated into RDS and visualized using Power BI and Quicksight.


 
Results / Benefits to the customer

This work started in 2023 and has continued into the new financial year. Early benefits have included strategy scorecards used by at Group level business reviews, as well as operational sales reports consolidated from multiple operating companies to better understand client business across the group.

Collin Govender, COO at Altron Group said, ‘Using AWS for our Group Data Lake, and Power BI and Quicksight as our visualization tools of choice is a great case of Altron drinking its own champagne. Our digital business company works closely with AWS and we have been very impressed with how quickly the team has been able to deliver on the platform.”