AJE Group Spurs Digital Transformation Using AWS Solutions

In an ever-evolving world, how does a multinational consumer packaged goods (CPG) company with operations in more than 20 countries around the globe stay on the cutting edge of innovation?

That was the challenge facing Peruvian CPG multinational AJE Group (AJE), one of the largest beverage companies in the world., when it decided to embark on a full-scale digital transformation. Until 2019, the company had been using on-premises infrastructure that was isolated for different tasks and spread out over a significant portion of the globe.

AJE determined that to achieve its goals, it needed to create a centralized, cloud-based corporate data platform to streamline its processes and manage its resources more efficiently. With over 10,000 employees and a large global presence, the company also needed to modernize its data solutions to empower data-driven decision-making across the organization.

“As part of our digital transformation strategy, we wanted to bring a data-driven culture to the company that leads to more innovation,” says Wilmer Rodriguez Ruiz, head of global data and analytics at AJE Group.

AJE decided that Amazon Web Services (AWS) was the strongest contender in both these areas. “Using AWS solutions helps us foster our business growth strategy and change paradigms within the organization,” says Rodriguez Ruiz.

Building a Corporate Data Platform Using Amazon Redshift

AJE created a data analytics solution on AWS to store, process, and analyze data across the organization. It migrated several SQL databases to AWS using AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS), which is a managed migration and replication service that helps businesses move database and analytics workloads to AWS quickly, securely, and with minimal downtime and virtually no data loss.

As its data warehouse, the company uses Amazon Redshift, which uses SQL to analyze structured and semi-structured data across data warehouses, operational databases, and data lakes. Amazon Redshift is now the single source of truth for the company’s data.

Additionally, since Amazon Redshift is fully managed, AJE reduced the amount of undifferentiated heavy lifting that it previously had to do for its SQL servers. “Our team is more productive now without having to manage a typical data center,” says Rodriguez Ruiz. “Our solutions can simply expand capabilities or create new instances to meet capacity needs.”

For data extraction, AJE Group uses AWS Glue, a serverless data integration service that makes it simple to discover, prepare, move, and integrate data from multiple sources. AWS Glue takes data from Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)—an object storage service offering industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance—and transforms it for analysis in Amazon Redshift. Since implementing the new corporate data platform on AWS, the company has reduced its extract, transform, load (ETL) times by 35 percent.

Expanding Data Visibility for Innovation

AJE Group is now using AWS to help build a data lake, which will assist the company in scaling both its data solutions and its analytics. For an organization with a vast workforce spread across many global markets, a central source of data is essential to promoting data dependence in a workplace culture. “We want to consolidate our data-driven strategy within the company,” says Rodriguez Ruiz. “The data lake will help us reach all levels of every organization so that all decisions are based on data.”

Highly available data is only productive if a company has a workforce that can draw insights and analysis from that data. Concurrent with using AWS to build its data platform, AJE has also been focusing on empowering its employees to be data literate and capable of applying quantitative tools to business strategy.

“Currently, we have successfully trained over 600 employees who are proficient in analytics and building information channels,” says Rodriguez Ruiz. “Within the next year and a half, we want to triple that number so that we reach all levels within the organization.”

AJE’s digital transformation is already paying off in its daily operations, especially in data visibility across all departments. Previously, internal teams had to wait 4–5 hours to access data that they needed. Now, that data arrives in near real time, and those teams can make faster data-driven decisions. AJE’s business analysts have been able to complete consultations and cost-benefit analyses much more quickly.

“We have delivered the data availability needed for the entire organization to be self-sufficient,” says Rodriguez Ruiz. “Every department has the information to make optimal decisions to accomplish the company’s vision.”

Using AWS, AJE has also gained increased scalability to expand into new markets. “It’s much faster to scale our processes now that we are on the cloud,” says Rodriguez Ruiz. “This opens up opportunities to be able to grow in other countries according to business needs.”

Investing in a Data-Driven Future

As its digital transformation progresses, AJE Group continues to seek out innovative ways to expand its business. The company still works to instill a data-centric culture among its workforce and promotes the use of analytical tools to explore new opportunities.

With the prevalence of artificial intelligence and machine learning, AJE Group plans to create its own analytics service solutions. “Using AWS, we have empowered our workforce in data analytics,” says Rodriguez Ruiz. “There are opportunities for us to expand into offering predictive analytics and information self-services.”

To learn more, view the AJE Group case study here.