This guest post by Alex Reynolds, Founder and CEO of VGT2, explores how our integration of Amazon QuickSight into the VGT2 platform has significantly enhanced our analytics capabilities, yielding annual savings of up to $500,000 per customer. The savings vary depending on the size of their analysis teams, data tools, and development requirements. This impressive outcome translates to a staggering 20-fold return on our investment in QuickSight.
VGT2 was established with the mission to revolutionize supply chain management for various industries. Since our inception in 2014, we have harnessed the power of Amazon Web Services (AWS) to drive continuous innovation, offering both out-of-the-box and customizable solutions designed for the future. As a software as a service (SaaS) platform catering to distribution and manufacturing sectors, we seamlessly integrate with any enterprise resource planning (ERP) system.
Addressing Supply Chain Challenges
Our foundation was built upon addressing critical challenges faced by SaaS supply chain platforms in the distribution and manufacturing realms. Traditionally, businesses had to adapt their processes to fit technology or juggle multiple custom solutions to achieve end-to-end supply chain visibility. However, these legacy systems often fail to scale effectively. Consequently, we designed our platform on AWS from the ground up, ensuring it is innovative, flexible, and scalable.
Our 80/20 model allows 80% of our solution to be operational straight out of the box, while enabling users to customize the remaining 20%. As a central hub for multiple business functionalities—including ERP, commerce, CRM, and logistics—we manage vast amounts of critical data.
When our customers expressed the need for analytics to better understand their data, we initially considered developing these capabilities in-house. However, this route proved costly, time-consuming, and limited in functionality. Instead, we decided to integrate offline and online data from various sources and leverage the analytical power of Amazon QuickSight Embedded. This approach provides our clients with near-real-time complex analysis without the need for an extensive analytics team. Moreover, data is presented in clear visual formats within our platform, streamlining workflows.
Delivering Actionable Insights through QuickSight
Developing custom analytics solutions can be prohibitively expensive and may not meet all of a customer’s needs. However, consolidating diverse data types from multiple sources and processing them to generate actionable business intelligence in a single platform is challenging. By utilizing QuickSight Embedded, we and our clients have gained the flexibility to analyze various data sources quickly and thoroughly.
The integration of QuickSight with our existing systems, built on a flexible architecture, allows our customers to efficiently utilize both online and offline data at scale to inform their business strategies. We track all interactions with commerce systems and payment portals to gain insights into customer behaviors. This data, combined with ERP order information, enables our clients to compare offline and online purchases effectively and assess the impact of their digital presence. Built on the Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), our platform stages data that is processed into datasets within SPICE—the rapid, in-memory engine of QuickSight. SPICE allows for swift analysis and detailed visualizations, managing millions of data rows each day. This amounts to approximately 300–500 million data points processed daily, and we are only beginning to tap into this potential!
However, our role extends beyond merely being a technology partner. Drawing on our deep expertise in the manufacturing and distribution sectors, we delve into our customers’ challenges and needs to tailor solutions effectively. Thanks to QuickSight, we can remain at the forefront of innovation in digital services, which is crucial to our mission.
Significant Savings and Enhanced Capabilities
Integrating analytics through QuickSight empowers our clients to conduct in-depth analyses, incorporate additional datasets, and utilize non-VGT2 connectors—all without the need to establish a dedicated analytics team or incur the costs associated with custom-built solutions. This results in average annual savings of $200,000 to $500,000 for our customers.
Moreover, QuickSight democratizes data analysis, allowing business users to automate data processes and leverage business intelligence independently. Through the ability to analyze and benchmark external data patterns, teams can uncover new revenue opportunities. Perhaps the most exciting feature for users is the near-real-time unified view of both offline and online data, which facilitates predictive modeling and forecasting unlike ever before.
Preparing for the Future with Data Analytics
Looking ahead to 2025, we anticipate significant growth of 200-300% driven by our QuickSight integration. We expect that, within the next few years, 80% of our customers will adopt QuickSight for internal projects. Indeed, we have already witnessed several clients launching internal initiatives utilizing QuickSight within our platform. Additionally, we are beginning to develop AI models within VGT2 that will feed real-time metrics into QuickSight and other AWS services, embedding AI capabilities into business operations.
This forward-thinking strategy aligns with our company’s ethos: we sell the future, as that is where the industry is headed, and QuickSight is instrumental in guiding us there. For further insights, you can explore another blog post here.
Conclusion
In summary, the integration of Amazon QuickSight into the VGT2 platform empowers our customers with enhanced analytics capabilities, significant cost savings, and a strategic advantage in the competitive landscape of supply chain management.
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