AJE Group Optimizes the Performance and Costs of Analytics Workloads by Adopting AWS

Founded in Ayacucho, Peru, in the late 1980s, AJE Group owns a portfolio of eight global CPG brands that elaborate and distribute products such as bottled water, juices, sodas, and other beverages. Its brands are among the most well-known in Latin America. In addition, the company operates in more than 20 countries and is  one of the largest beverage companies in the world.

Up until 2019, AJE Group had been using on-premises infrastructure that was isolated for different tasks and spread across numerous geographical locations. The company sought a cloud provider that could meet three key criteria: a large selection of solutions, a high level of customer-focused support, and a strong innovation program. After evaluating several cloud providers, AJE Group decided AWS delivered on all those requirements and also selected CloudHesive, an AWS Partner, to support the project. “As part of our digital transformation strategy, we want 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. “Using AWS solutions helps us foster our business growth strategy and change paradigms within the organization.”

Since it began using AWS in 2019, AJE Group has achieved about 60 percent of the overall planned digital transformation in its data-driven strategy (as of mid-2023). It has also created a centralized corporate data platform that is used across the organization. To migrate its legacy SQL databases, AJE Group used AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS), 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. Now that its databases are on the cloud, the company is building a data lake that seamlessly integrates with AWS DMS to help scale both its data solutions and its analytics. “We want to consolidate our data-driven strategy within the company,” says Rodriguez Ruiz. “The data lake will help us reach all levels of the organization so that all decisions are based on data.”

AJE Group’s digital transformation has also yielded greater efficiencies. For a cloud 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. Using Amazon Redshift, AJE Group has been able to reduce ETL times by 35 percent. This improvement not only adds stability to the company’s data extraction and ingestion processes but also provides increased scalability to manage its current array of 22 countries and to enter new markets. “Amazon Redshift is now our universal repository, essentially the single source of truth within the company,” says Rodriguez Ruiz. “This has helped us support data models for all the different countries that we market to.”

By using AWS to spur its digital transformation, AJE Group has achieved a savings of 15 percent in infrastructure costs by not having to manage servers and by paying for only what it needs. To manage its data pipeline, AJE Group uses AWS Glue, a serverless data integration service that makes it simpler to discover, prepare, move, and integrate data from multiple sources. For its storage backend, it uses Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), an object storage service offering industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance. “Our team is more productive now without having to manage a typical data center,” says Rodriguez Ruiz. “Being on AWS means our solutions can expand capabilities or create new instances to meet capacity needs with simple adjustments.”

AJE Group’s digital transformation has benefited both its workforce and its stakeholders. Within the organization, access to and visibility of data have improved tremendously. 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. All the information and metrics from the previous day are available when the workday begins, which accelerates the company’s processes and empowers the sales team. For customer teams, interactions with external clients are now simplified because they can view up-to-date client information almost immediately. “We have delivered the data availability needed for virtually every aspect of the organization to be self-sufficient,” says Rodriguez Ruiz. “Every department has the information to make optimal decisions to accomplish the company’s vision and the execution of commercial goals.”

With its new corporate data platform, AJE Group is taking the necessary steps to instill complete digital adoption across the organization. This expansion presents a range of opportunities to use predictive analytics and artificial intelligence (AI). The company wants to hone its predictive models to run simulations that facilitate more flexible decision-making. AJE Group also aims to invest in its workforce to continue to grow data literacy within the organization. With such analytical talent at its disposal, AJE Group plans to venture into the AI space to simulate business scenarios, product launches, and potential new ventures.

“Any AI-driven company needs data,” says Rodriguez Ruiz. “Using AWS, we have the framework to empower our analysts to explore new opportunities.”