Leading Personal Care Products Company – Legacy System Analysis and AWS Cloud Migration Roadmap

The Customer is a personal care product company that offers skin care, anti-aging and nutritional products. With sales operations across the globe, annual revenues of approximately $2.5 billion and over 3,500 employees, they are known for their innovative, scientifically-backed skin care and dietary products.

The Customer's existing commission management system (CMS), built on a UniVerse DB framework, was the lifeblood of their business, calculating and processing payments for direct sellers in over fifty countries. However, this more than thirty-year-old monolithic system was riddled with challenges and there were not enough subject matter experts (SMEs) on staff who understood the core system technologies, hindering company growth and innovation goals.

In addition, tightly-coupled functionalities meant changes in one area could create unintended consequences in others, a critical vulnerability that obstructed development and made achieving required performance levels increasingly difficult. Different modules also had conflicting resource needs, limiting scaling options. Vertical scaling to add capacity, the only available option, was expensive and offered diminishing returns.

Finally, continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) was a struggle. The monolithic nature of the system made automating builds and deployments a challenge, limitations that blocked the Customer's goal of becoming the world's leading business opportunity platform.

Due to limited documentation on their existing environment, the Customer decided on a comprehensive digital transformation and ultimate cloud migration of their CMS platform. Their new AWS cloud-based system will be built to facilitate a microservices architecture that streamlines maintenance, increases efficiency, performance and scalability—and future-proofs the company’s CMS.

The Customer collaborated with mLogica to lay the groundwork for this much-needed transformation, including a comprehensive system and workflow assessment that would ensure cloud migration to AWS would be seamless and efficient, with minimal business disruption. mLogica's flagship automated, GenAI-powered STAR*M Distributed Workload Modernization migration solution underpinned the entire assessment process, delivering insights into the existing system’s core business logic and essential functionalities.

Per the scope of this initial phase, the Customer required execution of the following tasks:

• Analysis of major workflows and data structures
• Review of system components, with a view to decoupling databases and applications to facilitate maintenance and innovation
• Performance review of workflows and the commission calculation algorithms
• Benchmarking of current and future-state requirements as they apply to workflows
• Implementation of workflow rationalization

The overarching goal of the proposed cloud migration was to completely revamp the CMS, migrating it to a microservices architecture on the AWS cloud to facilitate:

Business Agility: A modern microservices framework deconstructs the system into smaller, independent components, facilitating faster development and deployment cycles.

Scalability: Independent scaling of each microservice based on fluctuating resource needs ensures optimal performance and cost-efficiency.

Improved Performance: AWS cloud architecture provides a robust platform for high-speed commission calculations.

Enhanced Maintainability: Loosely coupled microservices would simplify maintenance and reduce the risk of unintended impacts from code changes.

This digital transformation would empower the Customer to achieve all these goals and solidify their position as a leader in the direct selling industry.

Our team conducted a meticulous assessment of the organization’s existing workflows and data structures, paving the way for a scalable, agile system built on microservices architecture.

Deconstructing the Customer’s commission engine into independent, self-contained microservices supports the company's desire for scalability, flexibility and enhanced security. In this model, each service owns its individual functionality, data and well-defined APIs, allowing for:

Modular development and deployment: Smaller, self-contained services are easier to build, support and maintain. Any required updates and patches can be targeted to specific services, minimizing disruption to the overall system.

On-demand scalability: Services can be scaled independently based on their workload, ensuring reliable performance during periods of peak demand.

Optimal agility: Features and functionalities can easily be added via new microservices, allowing fast innovation to quickly meet evolving business needs.

Improved fault tolerance: Any issues within one service have minimal impact on others, ensuring overall system robustness and improved uptime.

The project unfolded in three phases, each designed to support distinct objectives:

The first phase involved conducting a highly detailed review of the existing CMS architecture, including comprehensive assessment of the infrastructure, databases and applications. Out of hundreds of existing workflows, the mLogica team selected six representative workflows for in-depth analysis.

This assessment was focused on decoupling the workflows’ associated applications and databases to understand how they interacted. Our team also examined the performance of the commission calculation algorithms. These insights were critical to designing the future-state architecture.

Building on the groundwork established in Phase I, Phase II focused on a detailed analysis of an additional fifty CMS workflows and sixty top-level programs. This provided a solid foundation to build the new commission engine, which became the linchpin of the company’s transition from its legacy platform to a modern AWS cloud-based system. This new system will offer greater flexibility, increased scalability, tighter security and enhanced opportunities for upselling.

Equipped with the knowledge gained from Phase I and Phase II, Phase III focused on designing the re-imagined future-state architecture and developing the modernization approach. The overall goal was to transform and modernize the organization’s core CMS platform into an advanced, business-agile system, offering on-demand functionality, flexibility and a multi-tenant architecture. This data-centric strategy leveraged qualitative and quantitative analysis to demonstrate the new system's capabilities.

Our team employed a cohort approach that utilized domain-driven design and event storming techniques. This method successfully identified business function cohorts, enabling faster realization cycles with a next-generation architecture.

Innovation workshops were conducted simultaneously to further expedite the transformation. Additionally, Customer-centric event storming sessions were used to identify microservices and independently deployable business applications.

Finally, our team applied the mLogica Accelerator tool to provide the Customer with a visual representation of the existing business logic, allowing for effortless grouping of functions through a drag-and-drop interface. This streamlined the modernization process, ensuring a smooth transition to the new AWS cloud-based CMS.

This comprehensive digital transformation strategy gave the Customer a clear path to modernize their commission engine. In adopting modern microservices architecture, they gain the advantages of future-proof scalability, enhanced flexibility, improved performance and advanced security.

By implementing these modernization steps in well-defined phases, the business can enjoy a seamless transition of their CMS platform to cloud-based microservices architecture while unlocking the full potential of a modern commission engine. mLogica's automated, GenAI-powered STAR*M Distributed Workload Modernization solution played a key role throughout the project by analyzing existing business logic to optimize the assessment and analysis processes.

This project equipped the Customer to transform their existing commission engine into a robust solution by delivering:

Clarification of project requirements: The mLogica team’s detailed analysis and documentation offered the Customer a clear understanding of the project requirements, including functionalities, technical considerations and potential challenges, for improved planning, development and successful deployment.

Improved agility and flexibility: The overall digital transformation approach supported the development of dedicated microservices that make development and roll-out of new features and functionalities faster and less disruptive. This empowers the company to adapt its commission engine to evolving business needs and market dynamics.

Enhanced scalability: The modular nature of microservices also allows the organization to effortlessly scale capacity. During periods of peak activity, individual services can be scaled independently to handle increased demand, driving optimal performance.

Robustness and reliability: Microservices architecture allows for fault isolation, so that issues within one service create minimal impact on others, safeguarding overall system stability and minimizing downtime.

Advanced data security: Our team’s in-depth analysis paved the way for a more data-secure commission engine. By isolating functionalities and data within individual services, the business can implement enhanced security measures to protect sensitive commission data, as well as leveraging up-to-the-minute cloud security features.

The success of this project enabled the Customer to build a resilient commission engine system that allows them to navigate the ever-changing business landscape with confidence.

The Customer's legacy commission engine presented limitations in scalability, flexibility and security. mLogica’s automated, GenAI-powered STAR*M Distributed Workload Modernization tooling, plus our team's expertise in microservices architecture, enables the creation of a transformative CMS that will drive enhanced performance and increased sales.