CRN Impact Awards: Cevo overhauls David Jones' workforce planning with AWS

Melbourne managed services provider Cevo has been named a finalist in the 2021 CRN Impact Awards in the business transformation category, in recognition for its work with retailer David Jones.

Cevo was tapped to upgrade David Jones’ workflow management from an on-premises platform to an AWS-based solution to help it scale and simplify accessing data for planning future staffing schedules. The company previously had done Data Lake work.

The old solution involved manual steps to ingest data and the original data would not be available afterwards for additional processing work. This limitation hampered David Jones’ ability to perform historical data analysis and make predictions for workforce planning.

Through AWS, Cevo developed a new data ingestion process, scaling capacity automatically for workflow planning on demand and cut down on idle time costs. The solution involved transferring data to AWS S3 cloud storage and workflow and scheduling data was further processed with AWS Lambda.

“Cevo's work on the Data as a Service (DaaS) data lake platform has been invaluable in accelerating the David Jones/Country Road Group journey towards visibility and insights from the vast amounts of business data that flows through our systems every day,” David Jones IT manager Sam Burgis said.

“DaaS has allowed us to provide rapid new integrations to partners, uplift our customer experience, and enable business intelligence through dynamic, ad-hoc queries of a wide range of data sources.

“In addition, Cevo's assistance in streamlining and improving our technology delivery through automation and ways of working will reduce defects, improve time to value, and allow us full leverage from our cloud environments.”

With the new platform, David Jones saw its change deployments reduce from days to minutes, automate tasks, cut data processing time from hours to minutes, cut workforce planning-related costs, provide better predictions and retain historical data to inform future planning.

Cevo said the project was completed on time, despite pivoting to new AWS services that became available during the project, in turn also reducing the ongoing support requirements and maintenance costs.

The platform has been live in production close to one year, operating to availability and performance requirements with zero incidents. Cevo said monitoring and analytics has measured how successful the project has been for David Jones, and that the systems are all running as expected.