SA Bank embarks on journey to centralise Human Resource data on AWS

The business challenge

The bank wanted to access data in one place for quick decision-making, which meant combining multiple data sources into one centralised data store.

In order to address this requirement, as well as similar issues, the bank’s HR team needed assistance with the data architecture and integration patterns. In addition, automation was required for easy onboarding of new systems.

This project was one of the first in the HR team’s journey to become truly data-driven.

What was delivered

The bank is in the process of migrating its technology estate to AWS and with many other projects on the go, had limited capacity to architect and implement this specific HR Analytics solution.  They contacted Altron to help them with this journey.

Altron provided an experienced project team, which included an AWS Architect and Senior Data Engineers to work alongside the bank’s team implementing a POC, which was needed to prove AWS tools were an appropriate fit and that data could be easily extracted from the HR source systems to solve some of the business problems outlined above.
The solution made extensive use of AWS Glue for moving and manipulating data sourced from HR source systems into Amazon RDS (Postgres).

The results / benefits to the customer

The POC was started in November 2023 and finished a month earlier than budgeted in February 2024.   The solution was accepted by the Architectural governance forum and go ahead given to the project team to continue with the rest of the implementation roadmap.

The POC proved that AWS tools and services were a great fit for extracting data from various HR source systems into the cloud, ready for analysis. The patterns developed in the PoC are able to be used as accelerators for the build phase of the project, and the expectation is that business benefits will be quickly realized once this next phase is complete.