Page 111 - DMGT550_RETAIL_MANAGEMENT

Retail Management

Notes
and asked us to build an Enterprise Management System to manage its business, end to
end. Sentini Technologies first took great pains to understand the company’s core business.
As a result, the Business Service Management system that Sentini Technologies designed
and implemented treated the Retailer as a single entity with multiple subunits each
influencing and affecting the other. At the same time, Sentini Technologies made sure that
the company’s bread-and-butter store operations’ management remained the centerpiece
of the entire BSM system.
The Customer and the Challenge

The customer was a large retail establishment and was looking for a management system
with the ability to manage all revenue-generating aspects of the stores - gather transaction
records at the store level from all of its stores, look for and report exceptions based on sale
processing times, look for unusually low transaction volumes, provide prominent coverage
to its top revenue generating stores, identify stores with the least amount of average
monthly revenues, etc. Also important to the customer was the ability to reconcile store
transaction records with its inventory systems so that inventory levels as a function of
time and as a function of store sales activity were constantly visible to its operations team
(as a supplement to its existing supply chain management system).
Additionally, this Retailer wanted to manage a multitude of internal systems and
applications. These included the Retailer’s Online Store that accounted for a significant
percentage of its total monthly revenues, the Network Equipment that connected all of its
thousands of stores to Retail HQ, Corporate Email, the Store and Internal Helpdesk systems,
its mission-critical Mainframes et al.
Finally, the Retailer wanted to bring all collected data together into a single “window” so
its Operational Management team could view (and act upon, if need be) various business
services and their performance in a single “pane of glass” thereby increasing the team’s
operational efficiencies manifold.
Sentini Technologies’ Solution Highlights
With thousands of stores, Sentini Technologies determined that the best way to present
data harvested from the Retailer’s store and internal resources was in the form of a Business
Services’ dashboard that would, at a glance, present key information about the health and
performance of the Retailer’s bricks-and-mortar (and online) presence.
Choosing the IBM Net cool suite of products as the underlying technology on which to
build the solution, Sentini Technologies created intelligent correlation criteria for the
data collected from the Retailer’s stores, internal IT network, its Mainframes and its Online
Store, among other systems and resources that are under the purview of the Business
Service Management system. The Dashboard that Sentini Technologies designed correlates
and analyzes the collected data and updates the Retailer’s Web Services, Financial Systems,
Internet Gateway and Security services’ statuses. Since other groups within the Retailer
needed this data presented in various other formats, the results of Sentini Technologies’
approach to meet those requirements. Also created for the Retailer were different reports
that analyze and present BSM data in terms of store revenues, working off an archival
database. These include reports that calculate the average health of the top revenue
generating stores, identify the least revenue generating stores, identify consistently poorly
performing store links, etc.
Other visual indicators that were designed for the Retailer identify the top 10 and top 40%
store health (top 10 and top 40% defined in terms of revenue generation by store) statuses

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