Application Performance Management Makes Order Management Process More Efficient

During the holiday season which begins as early as Halloween and continues through Christmas, order management is a major concern for every retail store. The typical retail business will handle more transactions over this 30 – 60 day time frame than at any other time of the year. In fact, some businesses earn up to 60% of their entire year's income with 60% of that occurring on "Black Friday" and the 10 days before Christmas.

The last thing a big box retailer needs to discover at this time is an issue with IT's ability to handle large volumes of transactions. Unfortunately unless a company puts application performance management software into place, just such a critical and hectic time is just when problems will surface.

Typical issues include an order backlog, order fallout and steadily increasing customer attrition. Orders get lost. Inventory tracking becomes inaccurate. The computer says the item a customer wants is in another area store, but it can't be located. Customers are unhappy. Associates start getting tense.

Ensuring the Performance of Business Transactions

WebSphere Application Server is the heart of many retail business transaction processing systems. For most businesses, the WebSphere Application Server infrastructure has evolved over time with various project teams developing Java web applications without a coordinated master plan. This results in an unpredictable run-time environment. Many IT departments are concerned that trying to implement a solution will require an extensive reworking of the entire IT system.

This is why every big box retail operation needs the two co-operative IT technologies, application performance management (APM) and business transaction management (BTM). The two technologies work together to decipher the mysteries of eCommerce web applications utilizing WebSphere Application Server. They can be used in user acceptance testing (UAT) as well as production.

BTM focuses on the individual transactions, while APM focuses on the applications. When these two functions are combined with a complex event processing (CEP) engine looking for patterns that explain and predict IT problems, a tremendous amount of information suddenly becomes visible and actionable.

For example, a large retailer could discover after performing a configuration scan analyzed by the Complex Event Processing (CEP) engine that it has as many Java and .NET transactions that do not complete and do not provide an error msg. The CEP engine can, in real-time analyze the event cloud and determine that there is a root cause for these failures. It may even be a logic flaw in the current running applications.

In a complex event processing engine where both BTM and APM, a 30-day compilation of transactions will reveal some important information.

1) BTM and APM focused CEP reveals the volume of transactions traversing each application even when they cross tiers from distributed to mainframe or cloud.

2) BTM and APM focused CEP tracks real-time, performance data on all of the business transactions and the IT transactions they are comprised of. The performance data is compared to service level agreements (SLAs) and the user is alerted when these trend towards a breach.

3) BTM and APM focused CEP identifies issues that may become cascading failures and alerts the user before there is business process disruption or user impact.

4) BTM and APM focused CEP reveals which production applications are under utilized which helps with capacity planning .

With this type of information in hand, the complex event processing engine can begin to correlate usage patterns. It can identify under-utilized servers. Workloads can be consolidated. And money for maintaining IT departments can be spent where it is really needed. In a sense this solution can predict failures, allowing IT support to prevent their impact and as a result improve the quality of service they are offering their customers.

AutoPilot by Nastel is an application performance management and business transaction management solution that has proven its ability to save big-box retail businesses considerable money. Not only can AutoPilot help IT departments streamline equipment, it helps IT provide a highly available and reliable system for handling all the transactions that even the hectic holiday season brings.

Imagine a holiday season where the pager never goes off. It's possible after Nastel's AutoPilot is installed. It's an IT management solution that will pay for itself.