Executive Summary:
A global financial management firm faced a challenge with its legacy system. The system lacked full-text search functionality for capturing comments during meetings about financial products, leading to inefficiencies and missed investment opportunities. To address this issue the financial management firm chose to partner with Jahnel Group. We are a software consulting firm renowned for its expertise in AWS OpenSearch with a proven track record of optimizing cost and time savings for clients.
The Jahnel Group team implemented a solution using Amazon OpenSearch Service for comprehensive search capabilities. The solution also included AWS CloudWatch for monitoring, AWS RDS with MySQL for data persistence and transformation, AWS CloudFormation for infrastructure deployment, and AWS Kinesis for capturing changed data. The solution improved productivity, decision-making, and competitiveness for our customer.
About our customer:
A prominent figure in the financial industry, our customer excels in managing portfolios and investments. They serve a community of families worldwide and provide customized service and portfolios. Our customer's investment teams leverage their expertise in pension investment strategy, liability hedging, and alternative investing to build custom portfolios aligned with each client's unique circumstances and goals. Their primary objective is to realize unique and meaningful outcomes for their clients by designing portfolios based on solid investment principles..
Navigating the Challenge:
Our customer's business challenge revolved around the need to replace their existing legacy system, which was used for capturing comments during meetings about financial products or funds. The old system lacked the critical functionality of full-text search, limiting users to perform only wildcard searches within a single database column. This constraint hindered the efficient retrieval of relevant information across all financial products, posing significant challenges for the internal employees who relied on the system to manage financial portfolios and investments.
Without addressing this challenge, several consequences would arise. The search process within the system would remain inefficient and time-consuming. Users would continue to face difficulties in locating specific information, resorting to manual scanning or relying on limited wildcard searches. This would result in reduced productivity for the customer’s employees.
In the competitive financial industry, quick and comprehensive access to accurate information is essential for making informed investment decisions. Failing to address the challenge of inadequate search functionality would put the company at a disadvantage. Competitors equipped with more efficient systems capable of delivering prompt and thorough information retrieval would outperform the company in terms of agility, responsiveness, and overall competitiveness.
The JG Solution:
Jahnel Group successfully addressed the customer's challenge of replacing their legacy system, which lacked full-text search functionality for capturing comments during meetings about financial products. The goal was to enhance productivity, improve decision-making, and regain competitiveness in the financial industry. To achieve this the partner implemented a solution that leveraged various AWS services. The solution enabled efficient full-text search capabilities, ensured data integrity and security, and provided a robust system for managing financial product comments.
The primary AWS service used in the solution was Amazon OpenSearch Service. OpenSearch was utilized for indexing and searching the comments, enabling full-text search capabilities. This was crucial for efficient search across large blocks of text, including comments spanning multiple paragraphs.
The system architecture involved the use of AWS CloudWatch for monitoring. Metrics and logs were written to CloudWatch Logs, providing visibility into the system's performance and facilitating debugging and testing.
Data persistence and transformation were handled through AWS RDS. Specifically, RDS with MySQL was used. The existing comments data from the legacy system's SQL Server database was transformed into real HTML format and persisted in the new system's database. The comments were stored alongside metadata, related entities, and audit information. New data was ingested through a REST API, persisted into RDS, and then transformed using the MySQL binary log before being sent to OpenSearch.
Infrastructure deployment was managed using AWS CloudFormation. The system's infrastructure was defined in modularized templates, allowing for efficient resource management. IAM roles were also defined within the templates, ensuring proper authorization and access control.
AWS Fargate, Kinesis, and Lambda were utilized in the data flow line to handle new data updates. These services were employed to stream and process data from the MySQL database of the legacy system, ensuring that the OpenSearch index stayed synchronized with the most recent information.
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Result and Benefits:
The implementation of the new system with full-text search functionality yielded significant outcomes and benefits for the customer. The challenge of replacing the legacy system, which lacked comprehensive search capabilities, was successfully addressed, meeting the primary objectives of enhancing productivity, enabling better decision-making, and regaining competitiveness within the financial industry.
A notable outcome was the enhanced efficiency in locating specific information. In the previous system, the lack of full-text search capabilities caused inefficiencies and difficulties in finding relevant details from the comments made during meetings about financial products. The new system addressed this issue and significantly reduced the time required to find information. Users had to perform multiple searches (one-per-entity) in the old system, while the new system allowed them to perform a single query that could return all entities in one go. This allowed the client to run 3 more searches in the time that the old system could run 1. The new system also expanded the scope of data and fields that could be included in the search, improving the likelihood of finding relevant hits and reducing restrictions on partial matching.
With the new system, users could perform comprehensive searches across all financial products, eliminating the limitations of the legacy system's restricted wildcard search functionality. The enhanced search functionality had a direct impact on decision-making processes, empowering users such as portfolio managers, brokers, researchers, and administrators to make informed choices. This facilitated more effective management of financial portfolios and investments, which could lead to better outcomes.
Why the Customer Chose Jahnel Group:
The financial services customer chose Jahnel Group for their expertise in implementing Amazon OpenSearch Service, specifically addressing the need for full-text search functionality. Jahnel Group's ability to seamlessly integrate existing code and their track record in delivering successful digital solutions made them uniquely qualified to tackle the customer's challenge.
Jahnel Group excels in streamlining the transformation of customer concepts into fully launched digital products. With Jahnel Group's established process and dedicated development team, they can supplement existing projects and offer valuable assistance throughout the entire development process.
About Jahnel Group
Jahnel Group is a consulting firm that specializes in helping companies leverage technology to improve their business operations. We provide end-to-end strategic consulting and deployment services, helping companies optimize their operations and reduce costs through the use of technology. Jahnel Group is an Advanced Tier AWS Services Partner, with expertise in AWS OpenSearch, AWS Lambdas, Amazon API Gateway, Amazon DynamoDB, and other AWS services.
