Retail Enterprise Business Management - A Case Study

Clear visibility into its stores' revenue-generating operations, a window into its "behind the scenes" operations and a way to bring everything together while retaining the ability to drill down right down to an individual store - These were a leading Retail establishment's principal needs when it approached Sentini Technologies and asked us to build an Enterprise Management System to manage its business, end to end. Sentini Technologies first took great pains to understand the company's core business. As a result, the Business Service Management system that Sentini Technologies designed and implemented treated the Retailer as a single entity with multiple subunits each influencing and affecting the other. At the same time, Sentini Technologies made sure that the company's bread-and-butter store operations' management remained the centerpiece of the entire BSM system.

The Customer and the Challenge
The customer was a large retail establishment and was looking for a management system with the ability to manage all revenue-generating aspects of the stores - gather transaction records at the store level from all of its stores, look for and report exceptions based on sale processing times, look for unusually low transaction volumes, provide prominent coverage to its top revenue generating stores, identify stores with the least amount of average monthly revenues, etc. Also important to the customer was the ability to reconcile store transaction records with its inventory systems so that inventory levels as a function of time and as a function of store sales activity were constantly visible to its operations team (as a supplement to its existing supply chain management system).

Additionally, this Retailer wanted to manage a multitude of internal systems and applications. These included the Retailer's Online Store that accounted for a significant percentage of its total monthly revenues, the Network Equipment that connected all of its thousands of stores to Retail HQ, Corporate Email, the Store and Internal Helpdesk systems, its mission-critical Mainframes et al.

Finally, the Retailer wanted to bring all collected data together into a single "window" so its Operational Management team could view (and act upon, if need be) various business services and their performance in a single "pane of glass" thereby increasing the team's operational efficiencies manifold.

Sentini Technologies's Solution Highlights
With thousands of stores, Sentini Technologies determined that the best way to present data harvested from the Retailer's store and internal resources was in the form of a Business Services' dashboard that would, at a glance, present key information about the health and performance of the Retailer's bricks-and-mortar (and online) presence.

Choosing the IBM Netcool suite of products as the underlying technology on which to build the solution, Sentini Technologies created intelligent correlation criteria for the data collected from the Retailer's stores, internal IT network, its Mainframes and its Online Store, among other systems and resources that are under the purview of the Business Service Management system. The Dashboard that Sentini Technologies designed correlates and analyzes the collected data and updates the Retailer's Web Services, Financial Systems, Internet Gateway and Security services' statuses (Figure 1). Since other groups within the Retailer needed this data presented in various other formats, the results of Sentini Technologies's approach to meet those requirements are shown in Figures 2 through 7. Also created for the Retailer were different reports that analyze and present BSM data in terms of store revenues, working off an archival database. These include reports that calculate the average health of the top revenue generating stores, identify the least revenue generating stores, identify consistently poorly performing store links, etc.

Other visual indicators that were designed for the Retailer identify the top 10 and top 40% store health (top 10 and top 40% defined in terms of revenue generation by store) statuses (which are also updated in real-time). Additionally, handy "smart" visual indicators of the status of other internal units and systems (such as the Online Store, the Mainframes, etc.) have also been created. Since trending is an important part of any data observation and analysis process, a 30-day rolling window constants is also available to show the variation in the aggregate store network's health (over the previous 30 days).

The ability to get the "big picture" is no doubt invaluable, but often, Operational Support teams like to drill down as much as possible so that, the root cause of a problem is isolated. In this case, by providing such an ability with the Business Services' dashboard, Sentini Technologies allows the Retailer's team to drill down into, say, the "Financial Systems" dashboard entity and find out how a particular store's POS system performance is responsible for dragging down this key indicator in the Business Services' dashboard.

Solution Benefits
Sentini Technologies spent a large amount of time understanding the Retailer's business and then designed and customized its Business Service Management solution, and the benefits from this system to the Retailer were obvious as soon as the system was put into production.

• Improve awareness of the impact of various store systems' generated events on the bottom-line quickly by directing attention to poorly performing or under-performing stores very easily.
• Ensure that network and system issues are identified and tackled before they escalate into major problems by analyzing network and system performance and identifying bottlenecks and problem spots.
• Enable faster decision making - Using the intelligence built into the Business Server Management system, the number of man-hours needed to analyze collected data was vastly reduced
• Provide visibility into the details while retaining the big picture - Most store-derived entities allow users to drill down right down to an individual store. A network-derived entity would provide users the ability to drill right down to an individual circuit or fault alarm.
• Improve the Retailer's operational management team's efficiency by eliminating the need to view multiple data repositories and systems - All collected data is correlated, analyzed and presented in a single window.
• Provide the operational management team with the ability to customize the Business Service Management system to a very large extent, thanks to the open architecture of the underlying technology.
• Grow with the Retailer's needs: The highly scalable and modular nature of the BSM lets the Retailer easily integrate other devices and systems that may be added to the Retailer's infrastructure in future.

Why Was Sentini Technologies Chosen?
As a leading provider of Enterprise Management solutions targeted at companies in the Enterprise, Telecommunications, ISP, Financial and Utility sectors, Sentini Technologies's engineers have, between them, built around 70 Network and Enterprise Operational Centers.

With our vast experience in managing customers' service offerings and business services, some of the features of our solutions that make us stand out in the Enterprise Management space are:

• Independent of restrictive Frameworks
  Our Solutions are made up of individual "best-in-class" products. We thereby avoid having to fit our solutions into restrictive Framework product suites, allowing Sentini Technologies to propose the best solutions for our Clients' needs.
   
• Fixed Cost Approach
  Since our projects are fixed-cost projects, there are no budget overruns since the deliverables [and Customer expectations] are set clearly at the time the SOW is signed.
   
• Round the clock development and support
  There are no interruptions in the development cycle since the Indian team picks up the US team's developmental efforts at the end of each (US) day. This also helps us provide our customers with 24/7 post-implementation support and maintenance.

Solution Snapshots
Presented here are a series of snapshots taken from the Business Service Management solution created for the Retailer. Each snapshot shows a different aspect (operationally) of how information was organized and presented to the Retailer's NOC users.