How Ambit Replaced Weeks-Long Manual Reporting with Real-Time Sales and Research Analytics

Client

Ambit is a leading Indian financial services group providing capital and advisory solutions built on deep market research and tailor-made financial guidance. Its Institutional Equities division runs two closely linked functions — Sales, which manages client relationships, revenue tracking, and corporate access, and Research, which manages analyst coverage, publication schedules, and voting performance. Ajackus was engaged as the managed delivery partner to design, architect, and build a purpose-built analytics platform to bring both functions onto a single system.

Challenge

Ambit’s Sales and Research teams each tracked a wide range of metrics — client revenue versus budget, publication coverage speed, analyst engagement, corporate access events — but did so in separate, disconnected spreadsheets with no shared source of truth. As the business grew, this made it increasingly difficult to see performance clearly or respond quickly when the underlying data changed.

The Ajackus team also had to design for a business where reporting inputs would keep changing — new Excel uploads landing weekly, monthly, or as one-off batches — while keeping the experience simple enough for non-technical analysts and sales staff to use without retraining.

No Single Source of Truth

Sales and Research each maintained their own trackers for client performance, publications, and corporate access, so leadership had no unified view across both functions and comparing performance meant manually reconciling multiple files.

Weeks-Long Reporting Cycles

Assembling a single quarterly performance view took the Ajackus team’s client weeks of manual consolidation, and any late correction to the underlying data meant redoing large portions of that work, directly delaying decisions on client coverage and resourcing.

Eight Disconnected Data Streams

Planned and actual publications, votes, interactions, corporate access, client lists, and revenue versus budget data all arrived as separate Excel files on different schedules, with no automated way to merge them into a coherent picture.

Compliance and Access Control Requirements

As a regulated financial services firm, Ambit needed secure authentication and strict role-based access control across Analysts, Sales Personnel, Hybrid Users, and Admins, ruling out an informal, spreadsheet-based approach entirely.

Growth Beyond Initial Scope

The platform needed to support an initial rollout of 10–15 users while being architected from day one to scale to roughly 300 sales and research analysts, without a re-platform down the line.

Goals

Journey

The Ajackus team was engaged for full managed delivery — owning architecture, build, and deployment end to end — and worked directly with Ambit’s Sales and Research leadership to translate scattered spreadsheet workflows into a structured, production-grade platform. The Ajackus team followed a phased build, starting with dashboard wireframing across both business functions before moving into the underlying data pipeline and cloud architecture.

Unified Sales and Research Analytics Experience

The Ajackus team designed and built two purpose-specific dashboard suites on a shared React front end: a Sales Dashboard covering top-client performance, business trends, service touchpoints, and corporate access history, and a Research Dashboard covering workflow tracking, publication calendars, coverage speed, and analyst engagement heatmaps. Both dashboards share common functionality — sorting, grouping, filtering, tooltips, and Excel export — deliberately built once and reused across both teams rather than duplicated, to keep the platform consistent and easier to maintain as new modules were added.

Automated Excel-Based Data Ingestion

Rather than forcing Ambit’s teams to adopt new data-entry workflows, the Ajackus team built an ingestion pipeline around the eight Excel upload types the business already produced — Planned and Actual Publications, Votes, Interactions, Corporate Access, Clients, and Revenue versus Budget, among others. Uploads are processed on weekly, monthly, or one-time schedules and written through to Amazon S3 and a PostgreSQL data layer, so every dashboard reflects the latest upload as soon as it lands rather than waiting on a manual consolidation cycle.

Production-Grade AWS Architecture

The Ajackus team architected the platform on Django and Elastic Beanstalk-managed EC2 Auto Scaling groups spread across two Availability Zones, sitting behind an Application Load Balancer and AWS WAF, with Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL as the system of record. The Ajackus team deliberately chose a multi-AZ, auto-scaling design over a single-instance deployment specifically to support the planned growth path from a 10–15-person pilot group to roughly 300 concurrent sales and research users without requiring re-architecture later.

Enterprise Authentication and Compliance

Given Ambit’s regulatory context, the Ajackus team integrated Plurilock SSO and Plurilock CloudCodes for authentication, layered role-based access control across Analyst, Sales Personnel, Hybrid, and Admin roles, and used AWS Secrets Manager and IAM roles to keep credentials and database configuration out of application code. CloudFront and ACM-managed HTTPS were used throughout, including for the static React front end and the Django Admin interface, so every layer of the platform — not just the primary dashboards — met the same security bar.

Observability and Continuous Delivery

To keep the platform operable at scale, the Ajackus team wired CloudWatch Logs and CloudTrail auditing across the EC2 and RDS layers, and built a GitHub Actions CI/CD pipeline that pushes deployments straight to Elastic Beanstalk and invalidates the CloudFront cache automatically, so new dashboard features and bug fixes reach users without manual release steps.

Results

Ambit’s Sales and Research teams now work from a single, always-current platform instead of stitching together spreadsheets every reporting cycle.

What went well:

Operational Improvements

• Quarterly performance reporting that previously took the client’s teams weeks to assemble is now generated instantly from live dashboards.
• Late-arriving data corrections that once triggered additional weeks of rework are now absorbed automatically and reflected in real time across every dashboard.
• Sales and Research teams both moved off disconnected spreadsheets onto a single shared source of truth for client, publication, and corporate access data.

Technical Achievements

• A multi-AZ, auto-scaling AWS architecture was delivered from day one, built to support planned growth from 10–15 pilot users to roughly 300 users without a re-platform.
• Eight distinct Excel upload types — spanning publications, votes, interactions, corporate access, clients, and revenue versus budget — were consolidated into one automated ingestion pipeline running on weekly, monthly, and one-time schedules.
• Enterprise-grade security was implemented end to end, including Plurilock SSO authentication, AWS WAF, role-based access control, and Secrets Manager-backed credential management.

Business Impact

• Leadership gained a unified, real-time view across both Sales and Research performance for the first time, replacing the manual reconciliation that previously delayed coverage and resourcing decisions.
• A CI/CD pipeline through GitHub Actions and Elastic Beanstalk means new reporting features can reach analysts and sales staff without manual deployment overhead.
• The platform’s role-based access model was built to satisfy the security and compliance expectations of a regulated financial services firm from launch.