Caribou Streamlines Procurement with Automation in AWS

Overview

Caribou, an organisation tracking procurements from an International Financial Institution, faced challenges with its procurement tracking system, namely data inaccuracies and inefficient manual processes. Partnering with Lambert Labs, they implemented a robust and automated solution on AWS, leveraging services such as AWS Lambda, Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL, and Amazon EventBridge. This transformation streamlined their workflow, enhanced security, and improved the reliability and presentation of critical procurement data.

Working with Lambert Labs has been a pleasure
Carlotta Maucher, Program Analyst (Space & Climate), Caribou

Opportunity / Customer Challenge

Caribou faced significant inefficiencies and reliability issues with its procurement tracking system. The process, which involved monitoring the International Financial Institution’s website in order to identify and flag listed procurement opportunities relevant to select organizations and partners, and distributing those opportunities to internal teams, relied heavily on manual intervention.

While the system included some automation, critical flaws hampered its effectiveness. Data was stored in a way that led to potential conflicts and inconsistencies, resulting in unreliable information. This unreliability necessitated several hours of manual adjustments daily, significantly impacting productivity. Furthermore, historical data access was limited, hindering comprehensive analysis and strategic decision-making.

Beyond data reliability, Caribou also recognized the need to improve the presentation of certain daily reports and data summaries sent via email, allowing recipients to more quickly draw conclusions from the data.

Caribou wanted to develop a robust, secure, and automated procurement tracking system on AWS. The challenge was to migrate from a fragmented, error-prone system to a reliable, scalable, and secure AWS-based solution that would streamline their procurement process and empower them to make informed decisions.

Solution

To address Caribou’s challenges, Lambert Labs implemented a robust and efficient solution built on AWS. The core application code of the new procurement tracking system was migrated to Lambda, a serverless compute service. The Lambda functions were run on a schedule using EventBridge. As well as being migrated, the application code was greatly simplified, removing the need for resource intensive third party libraries to parse JavaScript generated content. The application code was also modified to improve the keyword search functionality to more efficiently identify relevant procurement opportunities.

To ensure data integrity and provide a reliable foundation for their Looker Studio dashboards, data storage was moved to RDS, a managed relational database service. This replaced the vulnerable and error-prone Google Sheets, offering a more secure and stable environment for their critical data. Amazon Simple Notification Service was used to send daily report and weekly summary emails in a more robust and scalable manner, replacing Gmail, and AWS Secrets Manager was employed to securely manage sensitive credentials, enhancing the overall security of the system. Infrastructure deployment and management were automated using Terraform and CircleCI, enabling consistent and repeatable deployments.

In addition, a Django application was developed, providing Caribou with a user-friendly admin panel for ad-hoc queries of the PostgreSQL database, offering them flexible data access.

Working with Lambert Labs has been a pleasure — they are incredibly efficient, highly responsive, and consistently deliver smart, effective solutions. Their support has helped us bridge key technical gaps in our projects, making them an invaluable partner. (Carlotta Maucher, Program Analyst (Space & Climate), Caribou)

Outcome

The implementation of the AWS-based solution delivered significant improvements to Caribou’s procurement tracking process. By automating and streamlining the data extraction and management, the team saved and continues to save time spent on manual work, freeing up valuable staff time for more strategic tasks. The reliability of the data, now stored in RDS with daily backups, also significantly enhanced the accuracy and consistency of the Looker Studio dashboards, eliminating previous issues with broken data and missing information.

Furthermore, the new system provides access to a much more extensive historical dataset, enabling Caribou to conduct more comprehensive analyses and make better-informed decisions. Email communications were improved, offering a more professional and reliable presentation of data reports.

The revamped procurement process, with its improved keyword search functionality, resulted in more relevant opportunities being flagged and fewer irrelevant ones, streamlining the procurement selection and application process. As a result, Caribou are now looking to extend their procurement tracker by adding more data sources.

The versatility and reliability of AWS services such as Lambda and EventBridge was proved once again during the refactoring of Caribou’s procurement tracker. (George Lambert, Founder & CEO, Lambert Labs)

About Caribou

Caribou is a global consultancy working with ambitious foundations, companies, and governments to accelerate and deliver impact in a digital age.

They apply deep technical expertise and rigor to strategy design, fund and program management, impact measurement, and actionable research.

They work towards a world in which digital economies are inclusive and sustainable, driven by secure livelihoods, innovative business models, and bold climate action.