ignio™ improves operational stability and enhances retail experience

The customer has close to 10,000 stores in the U.S., each serving an average of 300 prescriptions a day, in addition to routine healthcare services such as vaccinations and regular retail sales. Each of these stores uses multiple applications for their day-to-day operations. Any instability or non-availability of these applications would have a huge impact on consumer experience and ultimately on revenue.

The customer needed to leverage the right technology to ensure the stability and availability of its whole gamut of applications that keep store operations running smoothly. It also needed to automate tasks related to common IT failures that hinder efficient operations and cause downtime.

For a large retailer, it is an extremely complex task to manage IT and business operations across corporate systems as well as nearly over 9,000 stores. The company’s IT teams need to manage critical infrastructure components such as operating systems, databases, and virtual database infrastructure. Moreover, they need to manage crucial business applications such as pharmacy store management, active patient repository, sales order management, inventory records, store order management, and so on. The customer also runs one of the largest SAP S/4HANA retail automation systems in the world for its core ERP processes. It needed to stabilize processes in the SAP system before migrating them to the Microsoft Azure cloud computing platform.

The infrastructure components generate very high volumes of data across the IT environment, making it difficult to manually gather information from the data for proactive issue detection. As a result, IT system errors often led to issues in critical business functions such as finance reporting, pricing, and sales order processing. Lack of analytics and automation meant IT teams often had to spend a long time resolving events and incidents and solving common retail issues such as POS (Point of Sale) device failures and item scanning issues.

Additionally, during the COVID-19 pandemic, operational challenges shot up because of the fluctuating demand for health products, which drove changes in store hours.

Digitate’s journey with the customer started with the implementation of ignio™ AIOps, Digitate’s flagship IT operations platform. This was quickly followed by ignio AI.Workload Management and ignio AI.ERPOps. The customer’s focus was to automate business processes end-to-end, including SAP and multiple other applications involved in the retail process flow.

During the implementation phase, ignio was integrated with various applications and systems for the customer. This provided real-time monitoring and automation and identified and analyzed incidents, automating the support of business functions across retail sales, inventory management, and similar processes. ignio currently covers close to 1,000 individual use cases, involving event management, incident management, service requests, health checks, and SAP operations. Some of the key use cases include:

01. Eliminating “Not on File” errors

The customer has a huge inventory of drugs and other products. Sometimes, because of missing information such as price or product codes in the backend system, a Not on File (NOF) error message may appear at the register during checkout. An employee can manually enter the details, but this often causes discrepancies in prices, increases the manual workload, and may even lead to lost sales due to pricing confusion and checkout delays.

Now, ignio autonomously monitors the transaction data for NOF errors. When it finds one, it proactively checks and syncs details between backend SAP and store (POS) systems, enabling automatic resolution. If missing records prevent automatic resolution, it ensures that detailed information is shared with relevant teams for manual resolution. Currently, more than 250 NOF scenarios are handled by ignio every day. The customer estimates $17 million in sales annually were sustained because of the improvement in NOF scenarios, improving shoppers’ experience.

02. Autonomous event and alert management

ignio has been integrated with 10 discrete third-party monitoring tools in the customer’s environment, from which it gathers more than 70,000 alerts a month. ignio correlates and filters these alerts, suppressing false alarms and auto-creating tickets for genuine alerts that require remediation. ignio not only reduces alert noise but also self-heals common events, improving availability.

03. Managing POS issues in retail stores

Company-wide, thousands of POS register devices are integrated with the ELK monitoring tool. ELK generates metric KPIs matched to static thresholds, which causes a large number of alerts. ignio converts this raw data into relational data and validates it with thresholds to detect anomalies. Once an anomaly is detected, ignio creates a ticket for the incident along with an email notification to the team responsible for resolution. ignio currently manages over 145 million events connected to POS issues per month, bringing relief to both ITOps teams and store operation teams.

Read More…

• 30% automatic ticket resolution
• 3.8 million transactions monitored daily
• 30x improvement in MTTR
• 250 NOF scenarios handled through ignio daily
• 500+ incidents eliminated per week
• 145 million events managed monthly 
• 15 key KPIs automated for month-end financial reporting and monitoring