ZAMP’s 5-Month FinOps Shift: From High Costs to High Visibility

ZAMP transformed its FinOps management in just five months. By implementing Pier Cloud, a FinOps platform, the company automated processes, centralized visibility over cloud operations, and achieved agility and efficiency. Equipped with strategic tools, ZAMP teams are better prepared to innovate and expand. This success story demonstrates how Pier Cloud’s expertise can be a powerful catalyst to overcome challenges and unlock new levels of organizational performance, even in multicloud and complex environments.

About ZAMP

ZAMP is a restaurant operator that has managed a portfolio of authentic and diverse brands since 2011. The company stands out by combining technological innovation with a commitment to delivering remarkable experiences aligned with consumer expectations.

With a focus on results and growth, the company seeks to positively impact people’s lives and lead the food industry through sustainable and innovative practices.

The company maintains growth plans by integrating technology into its expansion and operational efficiency strategy. The partnership with Pier Cloud was a turning point in this evolution process. ZAMP revolutionized its FinOps management — currently operated across three cloud providers — in just five months, achieving efficiency and concrete results with the support of the FinOps platform.

The Challenges

ZAMP faced significant challenges in managing its technology infrastructure, especially due to the complexity inherited from acquisitions and previous operations. These obstacles made it difficult to gain visibility, control costs, and achieve operational efficiency.

Lack of Visibility

ZAMP faced critical challenges in centralizing cost management and optimizing resource usage due to operating across three distinct cloud environments. In this scenario, technical and executive teams struggled to access reliable insights quickly and accurately, compromising decision-making.

Cost Reduction

The complexity of the legacy environment, combined with various ongoing migrations, increased the need to reduce operational costs. The team had difficulties prioritizing optimization tasks due to the lack of clear visibility, resulting in high expenses.

Operational Efficiency

Manual processes consumed many hours from the teams, especially in cost allocation and analysis. Additionally, the lack of customized alerts delayed responses to budget deviations. As a result, operations lost efficiency and agility.

Lack of Financial Indicators

In addition to lacking clear visibility into technology costs and operations, ZAMP had no financial indicators attached. Because of this, the company’s executives didn’t know where to direct efforts and new investments for their operation.

Risks Associated with the Challenges

The absence of centralized visibility directly compromises cloud financial governance. Coupled with the lack of financial indicators, it becomes difficult to make investment decisions. Without clear, updated, and real-time accessible data, teams lose the ability to collaborate in a coordinated way, identify deviations quickly, and act with precision.

In addition, reliance on manual spreadsheets increases the risk of inconsistencies and operational errors — making the process more vulnerable, slower, and more prone to human mistakes. Without adequate tools, cost control becomes reactive. And in this scenario, the risk of accumulating inefficiencies and pressuring financial margins is inevitable.

The Solution

To overcome these difficulties, ZAMP decided to implement Pier Cloud, a FinOps platform. This strategic decision transformed the management of its multicloud operation.

Through the Lighthouse product, it was possible to automate ZAMP’s chargeback, with automatic cost allocations, eliminating the use of spreadsheets and reducing manual work. The chargeback was carried out across all environments, including AWS. In addition, centralized dashboards and customizable alerts were created to give executive and technical teams a clear and immediate view of spending and efficiencies in the environment.

Still using Lighthouse, three strategic financial indicators were created for ZAMP’s operation: cost per order placed, cost per order completed, and cost per net revenue. These indicators, specifically applied to the sector, were fundamental in creating the necessary executive visibility and historical tracking of the financial curve.

Through Lighthouse, Pier’s platform uses S3 to collect the client’s AWS billing information. Afterwards, we work on ETL and processing to build the allocation and visibility required for the client’s context. We use Athena to read the information.

With the use of CCA – Cloud Compliance Analyzer – it was possible to generate practical insights that allowed ZAMP to prioritize optimization strategies, such as downsizing SAP machines, reservation and savings plan strategies, and reducing Kubernetes clusters.

Another highlight was the cost reduction achieved through the deactivation of unused resources and optimization of existing resources, based on insights provided by the CCA.

The CCA captures information via SDK from an assume role in the client’s accounts. With the captured data, we are able to assist our clients in identifying idle resources, applying best practices, and proposing technological upgrades, contributing to the optimization and efficiency of the client’s infrastructure.

ZAMP Results

The partnership with Pier Cloud helped ZAMP optimize costs and improve strategic processes, achieving operational efficiency. Pier’s multicloud platform centralized management and delivered significant savings, increasing agility and directly contributing to operational success.

ZAMP achieved significant results in just a few months of operation, with highlights including:

Tangible Savings

• Monthly cost reduction of over 35%.

Operational Efficiency

• Automation of cost allocation and alert generation.

• Significant reduction in hours spent on manual processes.

Centralized Visibility

• Dashboards accessible to both executive and technical audiences, promoting transparency and accountability.

• Alerts configured per project, ensuring greater control and budget deviation prevention.

Financial Indicators

• Dashboards showing cost per revenue of financial transactions occurring in the app were essential for executives evaluating new lines of future investment.

Lessons Learned

At the beginning of the project, we had an extensive discovery phase to understand ZAMP’s internal structure and hierarchy in order to reflect them properly in cost allocation and visibility. We had some difficulty identifying key people early on, which caused slight delays. The main lesson: involving more people from different areas early on is critical to achieving faster results.

Next Steps

With the results achieved so far, ZAMP plans to:

• Expand use of Pier Cloud to new dashboards and reports

• Set up more custom alerts to improve budget management

• Integrate the platform with additional teams, maximizing organizational impact

• Use other platform products focused on cost optimization and automation

The partnership between ZAMP and Pier Cloud is an example of how technology and collaboration can turn challenges into opportunities — and it shows how Pier Cloud delivers real value to its clients.