Insightful.Mobi Decreases Costs and Enhances Dashboard Performance Using Amazon QuickSight

With promotional costs making up nearly one-quarter of the overall price of products, it’s critical for businesses to make sure they have the right items in the right stores and on the right shelves. Addressing this need can be challenging in the retail and consumer goods marketplace, which is fast paced and constantly changing.

The chain between manufacturers and buyers includes many links, from suppliers, distributors, and franchisees to marketers, promoters, and floor salespeople. Collectively, their interactions produce a volume, variety, and complexity of data that is difficult to navigate effectively. A firm might offer hundreds of unique products, each of which must be tracked by store, price, display space, and other variables related to promotion and distribution. By analyzing this data, businesses can better understand their customers and make informed decisions on their placement and promotions.

To deliver insights to consumer goods firms, Insightful.Mobi used to rely on traditional, server-based reporting tools to manage data, but such methods are too slow, time-consuming, and expensive for today’s complex supply chains. Insightful.Mobi needed to offer agility beyond the typical customer relationship management functionality in its field sales products so that its customers could analyze their data quickly and cost-effectively. For its data warehouse infrastructure, the firm already relied on Amazon Redshift, a service that provides data warehousing reinvented for an ever-changing data landscape. “We already knew the AWS way of doing things, so we built on our experience,” says Paul Miller, chief executive officer (CEO) and cofounder of Insightful.Mobi. So in 2021, Insightful.Mobi decided to migrate its visualization and insights layer to QuickSight.

The transition was straightforward and simple. “It was very well structured,” says Miller.  “AWS provided support as we put together a proof of concept to help our tech people understand how to implement the solution into the technology stack and systems.” To get the most out of QuickSight, the company used online videos and training workshops with product specialists who answered specific questions the team had. QuickSight offers a dashboard and reporting layer that has native, highly secure connectivity to Amazon Redshift.

Insightful.Mobi also used SPICE (Superfast, Parallel, In-memory Calculation Engine), the robust in-memory engine designed to work with Amazon QuickSight to rapidly perform advanced calculations and serve data. With these tools, Insightful.Mobi can now help customers by creating and publishing dashboards with insights powered by machine learning. Insightful.Mobi’s customers can quickly access these dashboards from any device to look for patterns and outliers, leading to a better understanding and use of their data. “Amazon QuickSight is serverless, scalable, and superfast, so our customers can slice and dice their data in lots of different ways according to what suits their needs,” Miller says.

Among the most important benefits Insightful.Mobi has achieved using its AWS technical stack are enhanced productivity and cost-efficiency. “On AWS, we’ve reduced the complexity of our production process so that the customer can be front and center,” Miller says. Moreover, analytics and reporting used to require the combined labor of both a business analyst and a core developer. “Previously, it would take us 2–3 weeks to make a new dashboard or set of reports for our customers,” Miller says. “Using Amazon QuickSight, a business analyst working directly with a customer can create new dashboards and reports in less than 1 day.”