Cloud spending that grows faster than the business value it delivers is one of the most common challenges facing enterprise IT leaders today. For a manufacturing customer running multiple business units on AWS, runaway costs and slow reporting had created a dangerous blind spot until ACME stepped in.
The Challenge
Industry: Manufacturing. The customer’s AWS spend was ballooning across different business units with no unified view. Leadership, Finance, and Operations teams each had different tools and visibility none of them complete. Reports took too long to generate, and by the time the numbers were available, the window to act had often passed. Cost anomalies were discovered retrospectively, not proactively.
The Solution
ACME implemented a two-layer solution that brought together cost intelligence and natural language AI:
Layer 1 CUDOS Dashboards on Amazon QuickSight: ACME deployed the Cloud Intelligence Dashboards (CUDOS) framework, centralising all AWS cost and usage data into a single, always-current source of truth. The dashboards give Finance, Operations, and Leadership a unified, real-time view of spend by service, team, region, and account.
Layer 2 Amazon Q for QuickSight (AI-Powered Queries): The game-changing addition was enabling Amazon Q Amazon’s generative AI assistant within QuickSight. Teams can now ask plain-language questions like “What are the top five cost drivers this month?” or “Which team had the highest EC2 spend in Q3?” and receive instant, AI-generated answers with supporting visuals. No SQL. No waiting for a data team.
The Outcome
Reporting time reduced from weeks to minutes. Automated anomaly detection surfaces cost spikes before they compound. Leaders across the business now operate from a single, trusted cost dashboard. The customer has reclaimed control of their AWS investment and has a foundation for ongoing optimisation as their cloud footprint grows.
The Bigger Picture: FinOps for the Modern Enterprise
FinOps the discipline of managing cloud spend as a business practice, not just a technical concern is increasingly essential for enterprises scaling on AWS. Cost visibility, accountability, and optimisation must be embedded into how teams operate day-to-day, not treated as a quarterly finance exercise. ACME helps enterprises across the region build that FinOps capability using AWS-native tools, ensuring cloud investment is always aligned to business outcomes.
