# How we achieved 40% reduction in leasing application maintenance cost with application modernization Our customer is a prominent U.S. rent-to-own service provider, offering furniture, appliances, and electronics through 2000+ stores nationwide. Their legacy... _2023-10-06 · Retail & Supply Chain · Data & Analytics_ ## At a glance Our customer is a prominent U.S. rent-to-own service provider, offering furniture, appliances, and electronics through 2000+ stores nationwide. Their legacy POS system, built over 10 years by multiple vendors, had become a major hurdle in scaling, operations, and cost efficiency. The customer required a flexible, modern solution to manage customer data, enhance scalability, and streamline operations to support their growing business needs. - **40%** — Reduction in maintenance cost - **76 days/year** — Saved on the operational overhead - **66%** — Improved user satisfaction ## Overview The customer turned to zeb, an advanced tier AWS partner, to implement a modern, cloud-native solution. zeb utilized AWS's scalable, cost-efficient architecture to migrate customer's legacy system to a microservices-based cloud platform, ensuring improved scalability, reduced costs, and better operational efficiency. ## The Challenge Our customer relied on a 10-year-old, on-prem legacy POS system built by multiple vendors. The system, used across 2000+ stores, was unable to handle growing customer traffic efficiently and required extensive manual intervention for maintenance. This led to delays, high costs, and reliance on third-party vendors for system updates. Our customer faced significant operational inefficiencies and scalability issues, impacting customer satisfaction and business performance. **Key Challenges:** - Legacy infrastructure unable to scale dynamically with traffic - High maintenance costs and manual operations - Dependency on third-party vendors for system upgrades - Slow deployments and updates, limiting business agility ## Primary objectives Our customer sought to modernize its legacy POS system with the following key objectives: - **Enhanced User Experience:** Provide a seamless, intuitive UI interface for both store and field users, ensuring faster transaction times and improved customer satisfaction. - **Scalability and Flexibility:** Migrate from an on-prem Oracle Exadata infrastructure to a cloud-native architecture that can scale dynamically with fluctuating traffic and business needs. - **Cost Efficiency:** Reduce operational and maintenance costs by automating deployments, upgrades, and reducing dependency on third-party vendors. - **Improved Data Management:** Streamline the management of 8TB of transactional data and 16TB of Blob data to ensure faster, more efficient data access and processing. ## Architecture and Service used The application was built using a comprehensive suite of AWS services to ensure scalability, security, and performance: - **AWS Lambda** – Serverless compute for dynamic scaling. - **Amazon ECS with Fargate** – Managed container services for microservices. - **Amazon API Gateway** – API management and secure communication. - **Amazon CloudWatch** – Real-time system monitoring and insights. - **Amazon S3** – Scalable data storage for Blob files. - **Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) and Amazon SQS** – For inter-service messaging. - **Amazon EventBridge** – Event-driven service orchestration. - **AWS Application Load Balancer** – Managed load distribution across services. - **AWS Secrets Manager** – Secure management of credentials and sensitive data. - **AWS Certificate Manager** – Managed SSL/TLS certificates for secure communication. - **AWS VPN** – Secure connectivity for cloud infrastructure. - **Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL** – Core transactional database. - **AWS DMS** – Managed data migration from Oracle to PostgreSQL. - **AWS Snowball** – Offline data transfer of Blob files to Amazon S3. ## Timeline The project was completed within 6 months, starting with a new branding and a holistic UI framework for Customer's POS system, including a high-fidelity clickable prototype to align with business needs. zeb implemented a phased, one-year rollout approach that built store and field user confidence by syncing data in real time between the legacy and new systems. The 2000-store rollout was completed with zero downtime and no field complaints, ahead of schedule and on budget, leading to an accelerated national rollout after a successful initial deployment. ## KPIs and Outcomes **Operational KPIs:** - **System Uptime:** Achieved 99.99% uptime post-migration, ensuring minimal disruption to store operations. - **Faster Deployments:** Automated deployment process reduced deployment times by 50%, improving agility and system updates. - **Data Access Speed:** Data retrieval times improved by 40%, leading to faster transactions and enhanced store performance. - **Scalability:** The cloud-native infrastructure dynamically scaled with traffic, handling peak loads seamlessly. **Security KPIs:** - **Incident Reduction:** Enhanced security measures, including role-based access control and AWS security services, significantly decreased security incidents. Our customer experienced reduced vulnerabilities, ensuring better data protection. - **Data Protection:** The integration of AWS Secrets Manager and KMS ensured 100% compliance with data security standards, safeguarding customer data. **Financial KPIs:** - **Cost Reduction:** Our customer saw a 40% reduction in maintenance costs, largely by eliminating reliance on third-party vendors and manual intervention. - **Return on Investment (ROI):** The company achieved a 10X ROI on their AWS investment, underscoring the financial efficiency and scalability of the solution. **Qualitative KPIs:** - **Improved User Experience:** Our customer's new POS system delivered a more intuitive UI interface, resulting in faster transactions and smoother workflows for store and field users. The system's ease of use reduced training times and enhanced overall user satisfaction. - **Operational Efficiency:** The automation of deployments, updates, and data management significantly reduced manual intervention, freeing up resources for higher-value tasks and improving operational productivity. - **Scalability:** The customer's cloud-based infrastructure allowed for seamless scalability during peak traffic periods, ensuring consistent performance without the need for manual intervention. - **Business Agility:** With reduced dependency on third-party vendors, our customer gained the flexibility to deploy updates and enhancements faster, keeping pace with evolving business requirements. **Scalability and Automation:** - **Dynamic Scaling:** The cloud-native infrastructure, built on AWS Lambda and ECS with Fargate, enabled 100% dynamic scaling, allowing the system to automatically adjust resources based on traffic demand, especially during peak periods, without manual intervention. - **Store Rollout:** Successfully deployed the modernized POS system across 2000 stores with zero downtime, demonstrating high scalability and operational stability. - **Reduced Manual Efforts:** Automated deployment and CI/CD pipelines resulted in a 50% reduction in manual efforts for system updates and patches. - **Infrastructure as Code:** CloudFormation templates facilitated automated infrastructure redeployment, reducing the time to recover from failures by 60%. Our customer's journey to modernize its legacy POS infrastructure with zeb's AWS-based solution resulted in a complete transformation of their operational and business processes. By migrating to a cloud-native, microservices architecture, customer improved scalability, reduced operational costs by 40%, The new system provided seamless store operations with 99.99% uptime and dynamic scaling capabilities, enabling the business to handle peak traffic effortlessly. This modernization positioned the customer for long-term growth, enhanced user experiences, and greater operational efficiency.