Cloud Transformation Generates New Revenue Opportunities

A growing business

After acquiring several companies over the past few years, Vision Graphics had gained diverse systems that needed to be integrated and modernised. Having inherited technical debt that could not be ignored, Vision Graphics’ Director of IT Wayne Roesner sought to grow the company’s agility and innovation in the process of a digital transformation.

As a result, Vision Graphics reached out to NTT DATA to help modernise systems and build a digital transformation plan. Working together, the teams identified a Bright Spot project where value could be delivered quickly. Taken from Chip Heath’s book, Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard, the Bright Spot validated for management the collective team’s ability to execute and deliver cloud transformation. The team illustrated that it could effectively modernise systems, freeing them from technical debt while simultaneously delivering significant customer and business value.

“As IT Director, I work closely with Vision Graphics leadership to understand what’s important to the business and use IT as a strategic lever to accomplish these goals”, said Wayne Roesner, IT Director at Vision Graphics. “NTT DATA was invaluable in helping identify a Bright Spot project, turn it around in record time and achieve a specific business goal by securing a large new customer account. The team at NTT DATA is smart, efficient and unique in its ability to translate strategic business initiatives into tangible technology deliverables”.

QuickSight delivers fast wins

Amazon’s QuickSight is a fully managed business intelligence service that allows users to easily create and publish interactive dashboards that include machine learning (ML) insights. QuickSight dashboards are accessible from any device and can be embedded into applications, portals and websites. QuickSight turned out to be the ideal service to take Vision Graphics’ Business Intelligence service to the next level, offering customers unique ML analysis that they could get nowhere else.

NTT DATA consultants blueprinted and built the Amazon QuickSight architecture in record time as the company wanted the Bright Spot for a pre-sales opportunity. Within a tight timeframe, the consulting team replicated the Vision Graphics reports that its customers found most insightful in a new QuickSight dashboard.

As an AWS Partner, the team harnessed additional resources to ensure that the solution maximised Amazon QuickSight capabilities. For example, the Bright Spot includes data filtering based on static entries and custom calculation fields where Vision Graphics can insert its own functions, thus allowing the team and its customers to search for anything from a specific time frame to differences in response rates.

With the data sets migrated to the AWS cloud and connected to QuickSight, Vision Graphics now has live data that customers can easily access from their own user-friendly dashboard. And through ML, customers now have advanced data insights that were not previously available. Customers can see, for example, how many new sales were made, analysing across service offerings to intelligently determine where they should invest their campaign dollars.

While the company had originally considered training its analytics team on Power BI, Microsoft’s business intelligence tool for interactive visualisations, the coaching model helped Vision Graphics accomplish two goals simultaneously. Now, Vision Graphics not only has a flexible, scalable, modern architecture for its customer analytics, but has also been taught how to use, manage and extend the solution moving forward.

Reaping the benefits

In what used to take several manual steps to process, prepare and send data to customers, the team now has a highly automated process that removes the opportunity for human error. Moreover, reports that needed to be redone every month can now be published by the customer from their own portal with the push of a button, thus giving developers time to focus on more strategic, business-impacting work.

“The consulting team has opened a path to a new revenue stream for Vision Graphics”, said RJ Hines, Head of Sales and Marketing. “As our customers demand smarter insights into their marketing initiatives, they helped us directly address these evolving customer expectations while providing an innovative new solution that sets Vision Graphics well ahead of the competition. And, the best part is that the ROI of the project has translated directly into new customer acquisition that will further fuel future innovation projects, a win-win for Vision Graphics and our customers”.

More importantly, the pre-sales opportunity fuelled by the new QuickSight solution was a success, with Vision Graphics securing a significant new customer as a result of the Bright Spot project. Having paid for itself, the Bright Spot ROI has proven to management the value of digital transformation and has spurred additional projects to further reduce technical debt while growing agility, innovation and most importantly, Vision Graphics customer satisfaction.

*This case study was originally written by Flux7, which has become NTT DATA Services as of 30th December 2019.