How AWS Is Integrating Advanced Business Intelligence at Whole Foods Market
In a recent blog post for Amazon Web Services (AWS), Ravi Reddy, data engineering manager at Amazon, and Maitri Shah, senior technical program manager at Amazon QuickSight, shared how the division’s worldwide grocery data and tech group worked closely with Amazon-owned Whole Foods Market to create a scalable solution to optimize business intelligence.
According to Reddy and Shah, the grocery data and tech team at AWS utilized the Amazon QuickSight tool to provide that scalable solution across over 25,000 users, generating one million views per month. Launched in fall 2023 and rolled out in two phases in 2024, that tool replaced a previous solution that integrated data from more than two dozen different sources.
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AWS’s QuickSight platform provides insights that enable store and executive teams at Whole Foods to make informed decisions in a host of areas, including labor planning, shrink, food safety, in-stock management, production planning, team member engagement, pricing, and store processes. Store leaders, for example, can use the dashboard to guide their actions, whether related to processes and compliance or daily sales.
Early results show that the tool has been effective in improving performance by slashing dashboard load times by 90%, allowing thousands of users to access the dashboard at the same time and cutting out manual work in managing multiple data sources. The program also was economically efficient, reducing costs by 75% with usage-based pricing, AWS determined.
“Our migration to QuickSight taught us valuable lessons that could benefit other organizations considering a similar move,” concluded the authors, citing the success of the phased approach, the switch to a single source of truth, and the ability to monitor dashboard performance. “The combination of improved performance, enhanced security, cost savings, and advanced features has made QuickSight an invaluable asset in our technology stack.”
The tool also enabled the teams to explore AI-powered capabilities that can create helpful visuals by describing them in natural language.
This week, AWS is sharing more innovations at its annual AWS re:Invent 2024 event for the global cloud computing community. During the conference, held in Las Vegas from Dec. 2-6, Amazon’s AWS will recap its recent launches and announce new capabilities.
