Improving retail operations during peak trading seasons

As part of ADMnext by Capgemini, the Peak Monitoring Dashboard proactively monitors systems and applications to ensure zero operational disruptions

Client challenge: The UK-based retailer’s peak season monitoring relied on manual snapshots from multiple systems, resulting in challenges with structure, interactivity, and storing historical data.

Solution: Capgemini developed the Peak Monitoring Dashboard (PMD) to be a comprehensive, one-stop-shop solution designed to monitor applications and infrastructure to ensure smooth business continuity.

Benefits:

Uninterrupted, lights-on IT operations during the 2024 year-end peak improving revenue
IT incidents reduced by 7.92% during peak season
Significantly enhanced ability to monitor operations
Provided more structured, visual, and accessible insights
Real-time visibility into key applications and servers with a clear, user-friendly view of system health

This UK-based premium merchandiser has three peak seasons, which include Summer Sale, Black Friday, and Christmas. During these periods, sales and foot traffic are five times higher, making it extremely important for the company’s infrastructure and personnel to meet the increased demand during this time and avoid any supply chain hiccups.

Facilitating a seamless fix-before-fail strategy with ADMnext

Capgemini implemented its Peak Monitoring Dashboard (PMD), which applies advanced algorithms to identify anomalies. This dashboard is a comprehensive, one-stop shop solution that is designed to monitor all key applications and servers. Its user-friendly interface offers a crystal-clear picture of overall systems health.

“The dashboard added a lot to our peak-season monitoring this year. The team has always been very proactive in peak reporting. I liked the fact that I could check it myself for real time information at any time, and I believe this is still the case throughout the year.”
Partner and Service Lead

To arrive at this solution, Capgemini conducted bi-weekly sessions with teams to identify manual reporting and monitoring challenges during peak periods. These pain points were addressed through automation and visualized via dashboards aligned with business goals. Proactive risk mitigation and strong team collaboration helped ensure a seamless rollout, which meant minimal disruption to ongoing operations.

By providing 24/7 monitoring, this dashboard delivered hyper-efficient support by enabling the merchandiser to immediately identify active and potential disruptions. As a result, the company could transition from manual, decentralized reporting to proactive, centralized interventions. Additionally, the interactive graphical interface, which also uses historical data, now provides continuous insights into server health during peak times.

The dashboard reduced incident detection time from an average of 17 minutes to under two minutes. Manual monitoring effort was cut by 70%, allowing IT resources to focus on strategic initiatives and maintain engagement cost efficiency without compromising on delivery quality. Trend analytics identified recurring spikes in server latency, up to 28%, during promotional launches.Furthermore, Capgemini’s expertise ensured that the partners could leverage insights from the detailed analysis of historical data to identify trends and bottlenecks faced during periods of elevated demand. This helped the merchandiser make informed decisions and ensure optimal performance for future peaks. The teams’ understanding of the PMD’s value and prompt engagement enabled swift resolution of queries and successful implementation.

Furthermore, Capgemini’s expertise ensured that the partners could leverage insights from the detailed analysis of historical data to identify trends and bottlenecks faced during periods of elevated demand. This helped the merchandiser make informed decisions and ensure optimal performance for future peaks. The teams’ understanding of the PMD’s value and prompt engagement enabled swift resolution of queries and successful implementation.

Seamless IT system performance during peak seasons

With the PMD in place, the company had access to a single-window, round-the-clock monitoring system for key applications that reduced the number of tickets by 7.92% during peak seasons. In addition, the dashboard accelerated the move to a well-structured, real-time, single-view, proactive reporting model. High-severity incidents dropped from 88 to 67 year-over-year. Customer complaints during peak periods decreased by 21%. Average page load time improved from 5.6 to 2.1 seconds.

This mobile enablement work is in-flight and has already shown promising results. Push notifications alert teams to anomalies within 30 seconds of detection. Mobile-enabled alerts will help reduce average incident mitigation time from 23 minutes to just seven minutes, a 70% improvement. The retailer aims to reduce business loss due to system outages by up to 50% over the next fiscal year.

Building on the recent success, the merchandiser and Capgemini are now extending their collaboration by transitioning the dashboard into a mobile environment. This is expected to provide client teams with real-time, on-the-go access to analytics. The result: faster, proactive mitigation of business loss and service risks during system outages.