Transforming Retail Operations With AIOps

By Heiko Mannherz, Avantra

The retail industry continues to go through rapid changes, and over time IT teams have found themselves in an ever-growing number of interconnected systems that have become highly complex as the business grew.

Any major retailer is likely to have thousands of suppliers, complex ordering systems, and an increasing number of devices used by customers. And that is what is just on the surface. The retailer part is just a tiny sliver of all that happens behind the scenes to make sure IT systems are consistent and reliable. In many cases, the lack of visibility makes it impossible for these teams to deliver quality customer experiences. Manual interventions to identify and address issues come with a high cost, not just in terms of the high-value brigade of experts occupied with 24X7 firefighting, but also customer dissatisfaction.

SAP's Role In The Retail Industry

The use of SAP software and other business applications has increased in the retail industry, with over one-third of retailers relying on ERP solutions to run day-to-day operations. Retailers depend on SAP systems to help them gain greater insight into business data and streamline business operations for uninterrupted merchandising, inventory control, and more.

What makes SAP systems unique is that they usually represent all critical functions of a company, making them prone to change or error that could severely affect daily operations.

However, owing to the complex system environment, the enterprises often miss critical insights. Hence Big Data and ML-based predictive analytics technology become imperative to unlock future growth.

How Modern Technologies Can Help

AIOps platforms provide a holistic and unbiased view of all data across different SAP systems within a network, ultimately enabling companies to understand what is happening with their businesses in real-time.

It enables you to analyze, detect and resolve issues at scale. These tools help identify patterns within data sets, apply statistical models to predict future behavior, analyzing events based on actions people take in real-time or historical data. These solutions are helpful because they handle repetitive tasks quickly, so IT teams do not invest time in manual monitoring of their business activities.

The modern approach provides speed and efficiency compared with traditional IT operations management approaches, resulting in increased customer satisfaction through rapid resolution times for critical incidents.

System Complexity Of A Large Retailer

For instance, with over 600 stores and over $32B in annual revenue, Migros is Switzerland’s largest supermarket chain and the largest retailer. With thousands of employees, Migros currently operates an intricate SAP landscape of hundreds of servers and applications. The system landscape includes more than 13,000 SAP users spanning retail, industry, and corporate operations.

The SAP Basis Services Team faced an ever-growing number of cobbled-together systems implemented to meet the complex operational needs. Over time, the team found its existing setup did not meet the needs of the expanding SAP landscape. Complexity mushroomed, requiring extra staff resources to maintain increasingly interconnected systems. The more the company grew, the more features and functions they needed to integrate into their existing configuration. It was not long before the administrative burden became unwieldy.

The SAP Basis Services Team needed many benefits from their management interface including; flexibility, scalability, and overall system-wide data output. But their primary focus was to simplify the system management for seamless operational experiences.

“We wanted a solution that enabled system administration and configuration from one centralized location,” says Balz Koch, Head of SAP Basis Services for Migros. “We also wanted to establish an early alert system that would minimize the chance of emergencies.”

AIOps Delivering Unprecedented Efficiencies

With an AIOps platform, the company created a system of automated alerts visible on a centralized dashboard, also sending them to staff via text message and email. Daily checks on all systems helped Migros automate additional functions and eliminate routine tasks. With these improvements, system monitoring went from a manual devouring grind to a part-time activity. The new setup identified performance issues and bottlenecks early on, with improved stability helping the company avoid two separate major breakdowns in SAP production systems.

What’s more, the database footprint shrunk to only 500MB. Clean interfaces drive lower resource consumption and make it easy for a new administrative professional to become productive with a far shorter ramp-up time.

Looking at the results, Koch says the new automation platform has made all the difference to Migros operations and customers. “It was important to us to have a system which is easy to handle, with a system administration and configuration that can be executed from a central position. The new platform does it all” says Koch.

About The Author

Heiko Mannherz leads Avantra's Innovation Program as Chief Innovation Officer, working closely with the Product Development and Customer Office teams. Serving almost nineteen years at Avantra in many different roles, the broader view on new technologies and methodologies was always at the core of his work. Heiko holds an MSc in Mathematics from the University of Bonn.