Estate Observability: The Retailer’s IT Superpower
Attention IT Leaders: If you could have any one thing, what would it be? More hours in the day, infinite budget, or perhaps just a clearer overview of all your IT systems in one place?
Superman had the ability to see through opaque physical objects using X-ray vision. If you had the same ability, you’d be able to see into your IT estate, effortlessly identify problems and bottlenecks, track customer journeys, and see where you’re losing money.
This is what Estate Observability offers, and more. As well as giving you a unified view of your IT domain, it has the potential to transform your business and create a significant competitive edge.
In a nutshell, is a service that provides comprehensive visibility into the performance and health of an entire IT ecosystem. For global retailers, the level of insight this offers is a gamechanger.
The birth of Estate Observability
Large retailers can be complex. While they excel at implementing monitoring solutions for individual IT components, they often face challenges when it comes to maintaining a holistic view of their IT infrastructure.
This was the case for one of our customers which had deployed best-of-breed monitoring solutions for each individual aspect of their IT ecosystem. Despite this, they experienced a serious outage which hit the business hard. It also took weeks to find the root of the problem and fix it.
What they were lacking was a single holistic view across their global IT infrastructure – a “single pane of glass”, as we term it. This facility would have significantly increased their ability to rapidly locate the issue, recover, and prevent it from recurring in the future.
Our engineers got to work and created a suite of dashboards and code to collect vital data across their IT ecosystem, and our Estate Observability service was born.
More than X-ray vision
Picture this: a CIO opens their dashboard in the morning and instantly gets a high-level summary view of their whole world. That’s the idea behind Estate Observability. Green lights signal good health; amber indicates a bottleneck, for example, and red highlights a problem that needs addressing urgently.
The service we offer is vendor and infrastructure agnostic – working with both cloud and on-premises IT. We wrap a human-led 24×7 365 monitoring service around it to watch everything that goes on within the dashboard.
And there’s a service management layer that helps the customer make the most of the data we’re collecting for them. This gives them future-facing insights to help with things like capacity planning, resource management, and IT optimization and investment.
Immediate and long-term benefits
As mentioned, Estate Observability provides a comprehensive window onto the performance and health of your entire IT ecosystem. One immediate benefit is that the dashboard can minimise risk and downtime by warning you about disruptions ahead of time. Even better, it can act pre-emptively using automation.
It also delivers valuable insights into business metrics such as customer and payment journeys to ensure optimal system functionality and minimise downtime.
For example, you could use it to measure and analyse store footfall or trade performance over certain periods. Or identify slow or problematic till points – which can wreck the customer experience and lead to store closures. We know of one retailer whose consumers abandoned their baskets when the tills broke down.
In addition, Estate Observability can help you understand how people prefer to pay, and assist you in studying global or regional variations. Plus, with it you can map out customer behaviours, which can help with marketing campaigns and customer loyalty and targeting.
Unlimited potential
With Estate Observability we can give you a single aggregated view of your business performance and show you how all your stores across the world are trading.
Using it you can proactively monitor and address IT performance and downtime problems through automated issue resolution. And it provides a platform on which to base your decisions relating to future planning, capacity management and even marketing and selling strategies.
In fact, with this high-level view in place, the possibilities are endless. You can drill down to different regions or stores to create comparison points to examine trading on different days. Or you could track the success of different strategies and use it to hone store window displays. The sky’s the limit.
Building competitive edge
Estate Observability brings a unified and stable approach to managing your IT estate so you can maintain robust, resilient systems. It enables internal resources to focus on continual Improvement and adding value. And it helps you to make informed decisions on digital transformation and future investment priorities by giving you solid data-led insights into the performance and deficiencies of your systems.
All of this translates into competitive edge, which is vital in our fast-moving industry where only the efficient and resilient survive.
About the author:
Jake Allmond works as PMC’s Client Services Director, specialising in providing comprehensive technology management solutions for retailers. With a career that began as a service desk analyst, Jake has always been dedicated to working client-side, ensuring a deep understanding of customer needs and challenges. His extensive experience in the industry allows him to expertly manage and support the entire technology lifecycle, from initial setup to ongoing maintenance and optimisation. Jake’s commitment to excellence ensures that retailers can rely on PMC for seamless and effective technology solutions.
