Executive Summary

Our client, a global leader in apparel branding and retail packaging, operates across 25 manufacturing and service locations worldwide, offering a comprehensive range of apparel labelling products to enhance brand identification. To streamline their operations, the client embarked on a modernization journey, transitioning from legacy spreadsheet-based calculators for production cost calculations to a serverless solution built on AWS.

The Business Challenges

The client's existing calculators were intricate spreadsheets housing the critical business logic for determining production costs, encompassing pricing, costing, and consumption data. These spreadsheets featured an extensive array of formulas, constants, and lookup tables, factoring in multiple variables related to material information, raw material costs, and printer hardware specifications that varied across locations. Manually updated data from various sources further complicated matters, and the company faced several challenges with the

spreadsheets: Maintenance and Updates: Managing changes to cost structures or manufacturing processes proved arduous within the spreadsheet environment.

Accessibility: The spreadsheets weren't easily accessible to all stakeholders, leading to the use of multiple versions concurrently.

Error-Prone: The complexity of the spreadsheets made it challenging to verify the accuracy of calculations, resulting in errors and inconsistencies. To tackle these challenges head-on, the client made the strategic decision to modernize their spreadsheet-based calculators by transforming them into APIs. This transformation allowed for seamless integration into their existing IT systems, improving efficiency and accuracy across the board.

Why Serverless?

AWS Serverless solutions offer a rapid path to innovation, enabling faster application development and deployment, ultimately reducing time to market. Serverless solutions are inherently fault-tolerant, highly scalable, and cost-effective. By eliminating the need for managing underlying infrastructure, they simplify deployment and reduce maintenance complexity. Additionally, Serverless provides the flexibility to leverage various programming languages and frameworks for application development.

The Katalyst Software Services

We adopted an API-first approach to drive innovation and accelerate solution delivery, and our choice was to embrace serverless architecture, leveraging the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform for development. Our development team collaborated closely with business stakeholders to comprehensively understand calculator requirements.

Based on these requirements, we meticulously crafted APIs that captured the necessary input parameters for calculations while ensuring the accuracy and integrity of results through robust error-handling mechanisms and security features. Given the absence of formula documentation in the spreadsheets, our developers converted these formulas into lambda functions. Stringent testing using Postman was conducted by our quality team to ensure the reliability and performance of the APIs. The foundation of our solution lay in microservices, which we built using AWS Lambda, API Gateway, and MongoDB as the NoSQL database. The deployment process was streamlined and efficient thanks to the Serverless Application Model (SAM) Framework. Finally, our front-end web application seamlessly integrated these APIs, empowering business users with a user-friendly portal to perform the required calculations.

Benefits

Centralized Solution: The company achieved centralization by converting spreadsheets into APIs, providing stakeholders access via enterprise IT systems. This facilitated quicker decision-making for sales, finance, manufacturing, and operations teams.

Error Handling: The APIs effectively managed errors and inconsistencies, minimizing the risk of calculation errors and quote discrepancies.

Ease of Maintenance: The APIs' ease of maintenance and updates streamlined the process of adjusting cost calculations, especially when materials, costs, or manufacturing processes underwent changes.

Constant Management: A user-friendly interface was implemented for the business and operations teams to update constants, establishing a single source of truth for all input parameters.

Cost Efficiency: Adopting the serverless approach reduced operational costs and complexity while enabling the development of highly scalable solutions with accelerated development cycles and a cost-effective pay-as-you-go model.

Enhanced Efficiency: The development and deployment of independent APIs further enhanced organizational efficiency.