Making Patch Management and Order Reconciliation Autonomous with ignio
Australia’s largest supermarket chain
ABOUT CUSTOMER
Woolworths is Australia’s largest supermarket chain. Operating over 1,000 stores across Australia, Woolworths relies on the 115,000 team members in stores, distribution centers and support offices to provide their customers with superior service, range, value and convenience. As one of Australia’s most innovative retailers, Woolworths understands that consumers are looking for new, simple ways to shop. Consumers can shop from their computer at home or on the train on their way home from work using the Woolworths Supermarket App, and their groceries can be delivered straight to the kitchen bench.
VALUE REALIZATION
- 75% effort saving per month
- 50% cycle time reduction
- ~AUD 0.25 million saved annually in operations costs
- ~10 order related incidents reduced daily
REACH US
Business context
Woolworths has to manage over 1,000 stores in terms of the operations, supply chain of the products on the shelf, order replenishment and so on. A large retail chain has numerous challenges to ensure their customers remain loyal; this calls for unmatched customer experience, glitch free store operations and so on. Manual operations for their backend operations that deals with resolving issues in real time is not ideal. Hence, they needed a solution which can ensure their business operations run seamlessly.
Automated Pre-Patching and Post-Patching (AppOps)
The problem
Woolworths depends on a large underlying IT estate including multitude of applications and their servers for its regular business operations. These servers need patch updates monthly to maintain the infrastructure system performance and security compliance. Woolworths used to execute manual patching operations which involved multiple teams to start or stop a service, performing the patching operations, multiple handovers involved in the process, and so on. These dependencies resulted in risky and erroneous pre and post patching operations which was time-consuming and susceptible to human errors.
The solution
ignio AIOps performs all the pre patching and post patching activities along with email interaction with different teams to achieve end-to-end automation without affecting or changing current business process. It seeks the required approval before performing any critical task, reads the response and takes action accordingly. The solution is ITSM integrated so that all automated tasks can be logged and can be used for audits as needed. This has resulted in the patching activities being completed in a significantly lesser amount of time. ignio currently covers approximately 3,700 servers in Woolworths’ ecosystem which supports five business applications and is in the process to scale to all of Woolworths applications.
Key values delivered
- Eliminated the risk of manual operations by making the pre and post patching processes autonomous
- Improved application resiliency and availability due to on-time and incident free patching activities
- Reducing overall cost of IT compliance.
Business Process Health check
The Problem
Woolworths stores across Australia send in their orders for goods replenishment using their SAP integrated store application. The orders reach SAP ECC where it performs the order checks and inventory status and so on and pushes the orders ahead to the Warehouse Management System (WMS) to dispatch the orders to the respective stores. This entire system uses three separate applications to raise the orders, process the orders and dispatch the orders. During communication between the applications, Woolworths was facing order drop issues and data mismatch due to it. This resulted in incomplete orders being sent. When the store manager checks for orders and notices the discrepancy, they then log a ticket in the system. Woolworths team then must manually check where the order was dropped and then recover the order and ship the correct items in the next shipment. This had a direct impact on customer experience as missing products resulted in the customer moving to the competition to shop for their needs. Woolworths
had to ensure that stock replenishment was done efficiently.
The Solution
With ignio AI.ERPOps, Woolworths was able to shift its order replenishment process from reactive to proactive. An ignio AI.ERPOPs based custom solution was designed to proactively reconcile store orders before they are shipped. At closing time of 11pm when all the orders are processed, ignio validates all the orders from predetermined times at all the 3 systems to ensure there is no discrepancy in the consolidated orders at each system. If ignio encounters any discrepancies, it informs the respective stakeholder in Woolworths to resolve the issue. With these two proactive checks, ignio ensures that the stores get their orders that they have placed daily without any order drops.
– Tony Fitzgibbon (Head of Technology – Enterprise Productivity & Process Automation Tools)
