Business Health Monitoring for Streamlining Retail Warehouse Operations

Supply Chain is the backbone of retail operation. Stock replenishment occurs everyday at stores from multiple Distribution Facilities (DF). The stocks are shipped to the stores from the DFs based on the orders received from stores through corporate order management systems. The IT landscape of the entire supply chain process involves several application services which are business critical and impacts the retail operations in a significant way. An efficient and optimized supply chain is the key revenue driver for any retailer.

For successful retail operations, replenishing supply of products on shelves is important. This is made possible through multiple warehouses. The company has 17 Distribution Facilities (DF) from which it dispatches various categories of products to their stores. Each DF handles specific products such as frozen, perishable foods, general merchandise, gas, and so on. These DFs are also responsible to replenish stores in their respective region.

Sometimes, DFs act as transit stations/shuttles for the goods moving from one DF to the other, based on the orders received from the Corporate Order Management System (COMS). An efficient shipping process requires proper product and shipping information to be printed on the cargo pallet. When an order is received and the items are available, the ‘Balance on Hand’ needs to be updated on the central system so that it can reflect at all the DFs. This ensures there is no duplication of orders or double-booking of the same products.

This entire operation is managed through various complex and interdependent applications and processes. Any disruption to these processes impacts the supply chain operation and in turn stock availability at stores, resulting in lost sales opportunity and inefficient labor utilization at DFs. Thus, it is necessary to have a 360-degree view of these processes across DFs to ensure efficient warehouse operations impacting revenue. For optimized functioning of systems, it is important to monitor these critical system processes and ensure that they are ready for business. The resiliency in IT systems/process benefits the supply chain operation to minimize revenue leakage and maximize product availability.

Business Health Monitoring managed the key business processes for the customer’s warehouse operations.

It provided a 360-degree view of the warehouse landscape by creating a blueprint of the critical business processes and tagging them to the respective distribution facilities. It performed daily health check of the application services and provided a real-time, geo-wise health dashboard highlighting distribution facilities and services which required attention. By analyzing the anomalies, Business Health Monitoring identified the probable causes of the issues and leveraged its pre-built knowledge to take appropriate actions and resolved them autonomously. Post necessary actions, it also validated the system process to ensure they are working fine.

For issues that required manual intervention, Business Health Monitoring automated the call-out process by notifying the Application Management Services (AMS) operations team for further action. This resulted in significant reduction in effort and Mean Time To Detect (MTTD) for the team. Within three weeks, Business Health Monitoring was able to implement health-check and auto-resolution for the critical processes for the 17 distribution facilities.

• 12000 Incidents managed per year
• 300k Health checks by ignio per month
• 75% Improvement in MTTD & MTTR