Driving retail digital transformation with AWS microservices

Our client is a leading beverage distributor in the Americas. Founded in 1956, the company has grown to become a major player in the wholesale and retail market, with 50 physical stores and a complex distribution network. With ambitious plans for national and international expansion, they recognized the urgent need for a digital overhaul to support their growth.

Facing operational bottlenecks and a disjointed customer experience across their five sales channels, they sought a partner to provide comprehensive retail digital transformation services and build a scalable foundation for the future.

What was the challenge and why legacy systems hinder retail growth?

The company's success was hampered by operational friction. Their commercial and distribution processes relied heavily on manual intervention, direct sales rep interactions, and outdated technology. This created significant challenges:

• Inefficient operations: A high dependency on manual processes for B2B orders led to delays, errors, and excessive operational overhead. The core issue was a clear need for Legacy System Modernization.
• Poor customer experience: Both B2B and B2C customers faced a slow and cumbersome purchasing process, with delivery promises that no longer met market expectations. The primary goal was to improve the B2B customer experience online.
• Lack of agility: Their monolithic system made it difficult to roll out updates, respond to market changes, or innovate without risking system-wide failures.

Without a strategic change, the company risked losing its competitive edge and its ability to scale effectively.

The solution: A modern B2B e-commerce platform on AWS

Pragma was tasked with engineering a complete digital overhaul. Our strategy focused on a full B2B E-commerce platform modernization, moving away from their old system to a flexible, resilient, and scalable architecture.

The core of our solution was the implementation of AWS Microservices for E-commerce. We deconstructed their monolithic application into a series of independent, domain-focused services (e.g., Orders, Inventory, Customers). This approach enabled:

• Agility and speed: Development teams could build, test, and deploy new features independently, dramatically reducing time-to-market.
• Scalability and resilience: High-demand services could be scaled independently, ensuring optimal performance and cost-efficiency.
• Seamless integration: We facilitated a successful ERP integration with a microservices architecture, ensuring real-time data synchronization and consistency across the business.

This new backend powered hybrid mobile applications and a web platform, creating a seamless, unified experience for all users. This project stands as a benchmark case study in AWS retail transformation.

 The Results: Measurable impact on efficiency and customer experience

The impact of the new platform was immediate and significant. By focusing on key business outcomes, we delivered measurable improvements across the board:

• Drastic efficiency gains: Through order management automation, the company automated 80% of manual processes in its B2B segment, freeing up staff to focus on high-value activities.
• Revolutionized customer experience: The delivery promise for B2C customers was slashed from 8 hours to just 1 hour.
• Accelerated business processes: The ERP order synchronization time was reduced by 95%, from 40 minutes down to only 2 minutes.

Enhanced security: Using AWS WAF, we blocked 98% of malicious attempts before they could reach the application layer, securing sensitive customer and business data.

This is a true AWS Technology Stack

Our solution leveraged a comprehensive suite of AWS services to build one of the market's leading wholesale distribution software solutions:

• Orchestration: AWS EKS to manage and orchestrate our Docker-based microservices.
• Compute & APIs: Amazon EC2 for flexible compute infrastructure and Amazon API Gateway to manage and secure all APIs.
• Databases: Amazon RDS Aurora (MySQL) for the primary relational database and Amazon DynamoDB for high-volume audit logs.
• Asynchronous communication: Amazon SQS to decouple services and ensure reliable, asynchronous processing.
• Security & identity: AWS WAF for application security and Amazon Cognito for secure user authentication.
• Storage & migration: Amazon S3 for durable object storage and AWS DMS for seamless database migration.
• Monitoring: Amazon CloudWatch and AWS X-Ray for real-time monitoring, alerting, and performance tracing.

What did we learn?

This project did more than just solve immediate operational challenges; it provided our client with a powerful foundation for scaling a distribution business with cloud technology. The new, agile architecture empowers them to innovate rapidly, enter new markets, and consistently deliver a superior customer experience, securing their position as an industry leader for years to come.