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How CCi is accelerating operational excellence in its technology infrastructure to drive innovation

Published • 19 October 2022

Software Development

Imagine walking through a factory and seeing its true potential – what could be improved, enhanced or removed so it operates at its best.

That is a day in the life of Competitive Capabilities International (CCi).

With 35 years of reimagining operational improvement across more than 3000 manufacturing and supply chain operations, and 75 countries, CCi is renowned for helping global organisations implement best practices to drive and sustain world-class performance. CCi’s flagship product, TRACC is a continuous improvement solution that enables organisations to plan, track and manage their global improvement initiatives on one platform.

As a leader in operational excellence and continuous improvement, CCi believes in practicing what it preaches by continuously optimising its product and service offering to meet customer needs. Living between two cloud infrastructures and about to undertake radical architectural change, CCi needed to reimagine how it could accelerate and sustain this transformation to improve service delivery.

The Challenge

CCi recognised the need to replace its multiple cloud infrastructure with one cloud infrastructure for their newest product release to improve efficiency and enable more agile innovation. This radical change meant that CCi could switch cloud providers as AWS Cloud was ideal for the innovation it had in mind.

The migration to AWS was taking longer than expected and living in both worlds was becoming inefficient and expensive.

“Running a multi-cloud environment is very complex. The engineering becomes very complicated when you’re sending traffic between two cloud systems. There’s latency that gets introduced and things start slowing down,” explains Werner de Villiers, DevOps Engineer at CCi.

“We got to a point where we realised that if we wanted to do it well and do it faster that we would need to get the right expertise, implementing best practice, talking to people who do this on a regular basis because that will help us to go faster, but also to do a better job of it.”

CCi realised that: “The only way to go fast is to go well” so it approached Synthesis Software Technologies, a software development company, as its migration partner.

“The determining factor was that AWS was their specialisation.” explains Jacques Matthee, Global Head of Product and Technology at CCi.

The Solution

“We strive for operational excellence in everything we do, which is why this migration was so important to us. Just as we partner with organisations to build operational efficiency, we needed a partner that could do the same for us,” says Isabella Meyer, External Communications Manager at CCi.

The priority was rapidly migrating all workstreams into AWS Cloud. CCi could have tried to rearchitect its workloads entirely as part of this migration but this would have taken longer and delayed efficiency and quick wins.

Synthesis began by migrating the various workloads and assessing architecture against best practises from end to end. Microservices in clusters across cloud platforms were consolidated into a single EKS cluster on AWS and all applications and infrastructure were deployed via CI/CD pipelines. All other auxiliary services were migrated from other cloud platforms onto AWS and using equivalent services such as Amazon API Gateway and Elastic Beanstalk.

“Synthesis are passionate technologists committed to the implementation of cloud and AWS best practice, and have been great to work with,” says Matthee.

The new environment is well architected based off five pillars:

Operational excellence

Security

Reliability

Performance efficiency,

Cost optimisation

Synthesis created a landing zone for CCi as this is the fastest, most secure way to build a connected cloud environment. A landing zone is a secure, multi-account AWS environment based on best practices with centralised communications and security.

Synthesis are passionate technologists committed to the implementation of cloud and AWS best practice, and have been great to work with.

The Results

CCi now has one cloud environment – eliminating complexity, unnecessary costs and increasing efficiency.

“It has been a pleasure working with CCi. They breathe operational excellence, and we learn from them daily,” says JP Pienaar, Cloud Optimization Practice Lead at Synthesis.

Simplicity

Latency has been reduced as well as other factors that has made daily operations complicated. An example of this is that CCi no longer had to seek employees that are skilled in both cloud environments.

How CCi is accelerating operational excellence in its technology infrastructure to drive innovation

Synthesis’ understanding of both worlds made the transition easy.

Visibility

There is environment visibility where CCi can see if they are under or overprovisioning.

Operational excellence

“The systems performance as a whole is a lot better. We’re able to respond to changes and deploy faster, bring out new services and we can fix bugs quicker. The dev team is already more efficient, which improves our client experience” says Matthee.

Innovation

CCi can now better leverage its technology for agile innovation with a well-architected environment. ‘We are looking forward to accessing AWS’s machine learning functionalities as we progress our future product roadmap.”

Matthee advises other companies who are looking to find partners for operational efficiency:

“When you are dealing with challenges and issues, that’s when the partnership matters the most. It’s not when things are going well, it’s when things aren’t going well.”

He experienced this with Synthesis: “What mattered the most wasn’t just the AWS expertise but our good working relationship, the partnership and trusting that Synthesis was going to make good decisions in CCi’s best interest during this complex project. That is what stood out the most.”

CCi has accelerated operational excellence in its technology infrastructure to better facilitate innovation for clients, but for a company that lives for continuous improvement, this is just another step in the journey to world-class.