Skillwell Helps JAMIX Reduce Customer Onboarding and Integration Time by 90% Using AWS

In 1990, JAMIX built an enterprise resource management (ERP) system designed for professional kitchens, and it has since grown from a small local business into a global software provider with over 20,000 users. Its onboarding and customer integration process was a slow, manual process, and a significant burden for its in-house tech team, taking up around half their time. JAMIX partnered with Finnish AWS Partner Skillwell to help build and run a specialized platform to automate the integration and onboarding of new customers using Amazon Web Services (AWS). Using AWS serverless technology, the onboarding and integration process is now around 90 percent faster and the JAMIX technical team can focus on improving its core platform.

Finland-based JAMIX is the provider of an enterprise resource management (ERP) system called the JAMIX Kitchen Intelligence System, which is designed for professional kitchens. Founded in 1990, the company has grown from a small local business into a global software provider with over 20,000 users including restaurant chains, supermarkets selling prepared meals, and universities. The platform is used in over 2,500 kitchens to prepare over 1 million meals every day.

As it became more popular and started being used by larger companies, the process of onboarding new customers and integrating their operations to use the JAMIX platform was becoming more complicated and time consuming. Larger customers used a diverse range of applications to run their kitchens and to work effectively, and the JAMIX platform needed to seamlessly and securely connect with all these systems to collect data.

By 2020, JAMIX had won its first customers in the US but around half of its technical teams’ time was spent integrating new customers. The company wanted to find a way of freeing up tech staff so they could focus on adding features and improving the core JAMIX platform. “Our team was spending too much time onboarding and integrating, and not enough time on our core product, so we started looking for a technical partner to help us,” says Timo Lehto, chief operating officer at JAMIX. Lehto evaluated several potential companies but chose to work with Finnish AWS Partner Skillwell. “Skillwell had the right expertise, and they took the time to understand us,” says Lehto. “It was easy talking to them and they quickly earned our trust.”

Lehto’s plan was to use Skillwell to build an integration platform to allow the JAMIX tech team to focus on improving its core platform. Skillwell built the platform using serverless technology from AWS that sped up the process by automating many of the manual integration tasks.

To execute integration functions, Skillwell used AWS Lambda, a serverless, event-driven compute service that lets users run code without thinking about servers or clusters. AWS Lambda functions form the backbone of the integration platform and are used to perform each specific integration task. To collect inputs from customers, it used Amazon API Gateway (API Gateway), a fully managed service that makes it easy for developers to create, publish, maintain, monitor, and secure APIs at any scale, and Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), which offers fully managed message queuing for microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications.

API Gateway transmits information to Amazon SQS, where it is stored temporarily until processed by other components. Skillwell also used Amazon EventBridge, which helps scheduling integration events at scale in an event-driven architecture. The other major component is Amazon DynamoDB, a fast and flexible NoSQL database service for any scale. AWS Lambda functions and APIs use Amazon DynamoDB to store and retrieve data, allowing both batch processing and near-real-time interactivity with the platform. Using the new platform has made a big improvement, with the time needed to integrate a large kitchen falling by up to 90 percent. “One integration took about 10 months, which wasn’t unusual,” says Lehto. “Now, the average integration takes 2 or 3 weeks.”

JAMIX is now working closely with Skillwell to ensure all its new customers are onboarded as quickly and efficiently as possible. The move has transformed what was once a weakness, into a strength. “Integrations were a burden and something we used to be a little anxious about, but now they are a competitive and strategic advantage,” says Lehto. “We are more confident selling integrations and it’s not just because we are saving time, it’s because now we have the capacity to do them.”

Looking to the future, JAMIX has already started expanding its platform’s capabilities by allowing customers to measure the environmental impact of their kitchen by tracking the carbon footprint of ingredients. The next step is to grow the platform even further and to make more use of all the data it collects. “We want to bring artificial intelligence into the mix because we have so much interesting data,” says Lehto. “Our vision is for JAMIX to be able to help all kitchen employees, not just the manager.”

JAMIX values its relationship with Skillwell and expects the companies to continue working together for the foreseeable future. “If we need something new, we can ping them and they are very quick to respond,” says Lehto. “Skillwell are like our colleagues, they fit into the JAMIX culture.”