ABOUT:
Chai Point, India’s largest organised Chai retailer, brings a perfectly brewed cup of Chai made with fresh, natural ingredients to offices and working professionals around the country. With over 100 service hubs, Chai-on-Call and boxC.in are designed for corporate. Chai point was founded in 2010 , and it is India’s largest chai retailer who has about 100 retail shops. There is on-demand chai delivery service , chai-on-call and IOT-enabled chai. They also produces snacks called made-for-chai. They had over 800 employees and are located in 8 cities: Bangalore, Delhi, Gurgaon, Noida, Mumbai, Pune , Hyderabad, and Chennai. It has become a big brand and currently they are selling about 300,000 cups each day.
CHALLENGES:
The problems was to set up and expand a presence in the market where utilisation of tea was about 15 times that of coffee, Chai Point needed a extremely reliable, expandable infrastructure to run a pivotal business applications including a custom enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, a customer relationship management (CRM) system. They had a very strong idea to become the leader in market but they knew their services were not as strong as the coffee market. They needed an infrastructure that could scale to support their rapid expansion.
PROBLEMS FACED:
They were intent to that only a cloud-based service could meet their infrastructure demands, and they considered a wide range of cloud-service providers like GCP and Microsoft-Azure before deciding that they will use Amazon Web Services (AWS).Their founder says that AWS had that momentum in creating and launching services and they received a positive feedback from the technology team which boosted their confidence.
Chai point, the integral systems used were Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management(CRM) and Inventory Management System. In a span of short time they started using SHARK systems and in 2016 they started with boxc.in . They were using these new technologies, they knew they had to scale up the progress and have more customers. As they were using boxc.in they started selling the products to other companies, which at that time was rare and got lot of attention from everyone.
Due to their massive growth, to store data and additional analytics with this data was needed which demanded them huge resources. There they started to use AWS.
SERVICES:
VPC (Virtual Private Cloud): VPC is a non-public cloud that enables you to launch AWS resources into a virtual network which is defined by you. Chai Point uses an Cloud (Amazon VPC) that enables the business running companies to separate their delicate internal systems from the Internet and provide access to public-facing systems on the internet. It helped them to make their services more secure and its difficult for the hackers to penetrate through it.
S3: If any customers upload their data like photos ,video etc. on the app it is directly stored in S3. All the request from customers are stored in S3. If suddenly there are many users requesting for chai at the same time then S3 can scale quickly in order to meet high request rate. It helps the company to back up the data which they are using day to day like customer information, number of chai cups sold per day etc.
EC2: It runs SHARK on it and maintains it and also it is a cloud based platform helps in rapid and quick integration of billing and tracking across all chai stores, through mobile payments. It is also connected to the workers phone working at chai point. The app is called call of duty. The machine sends the notification automatically if there is any refilling required in quantity of tea and milk. Machine automatically tracks and stores every cup spend in RDS to maintain a record of it.
RDS: Chai point needs to back up every data at the end of the day but they can’t do this manually so RDS does this for them in every 24 hours. It helps to store every real time transaction made, cups spend per second/minute etc. and makes a record for it.
BENEFITS:
o Running its vital systems on AWS has delivered a wide range of benefits to Chai Point.
o Scaled to support the sale of 150,000 cups of chai daily.
o They were also able to complete 2–3 software releases per month on SHARK system for which they didn’t had to spend additional hardware.
o With the help of AWS ,chai point was able to minimise the cost. They were able to invest more in their IT infrastructure needs based on demand.
o They also didn’t need to purchase the hardware upfront based on their companies growth ,which saved a lot of their money.
o AWS provided a stability and is giving chai point more options to explore further such as rolling out SHARK system to small business start-ups as a seller.
o The cost is controlled by investing on IT infrastructure based on demand.
o The business is running its key systems on AWS.