Managing sales rush

Cognizant’s business is organised and managed primarily around four vertically-oriented business segments: Financial Services, Healthcare, Manufacturing, Retail and Logistics. In 2010, in terms retail services, Cognizant saw an increase in business transformation projects, such as service platform development, modernisation of core retail systems and multi-channel expansion, especially e-commerce.

CASE STUDY

Cognizant recently helped global retailers successfully manage the peak shopping season using its business process as a service (BPaaS) platform, Intellipeak. The BPaaS platform combines software, services, and industry-specific best practices to provide an end-to-end business solution. Using Intellipeak, Cognizant supported more than a dozen retailers across three continents in the 2010 peak season, representing more than 30,000 stores and billions of dollars in online transactions.

Intellipeak enables retailers to manage key risks and achieve trouble-free high-volume sales during the peak shopping season by assessing the readiness of business processes, IT systems, and underlying infrastructure. It covers all key business process assets and supports the entire retail life-cycle from merchandising, warehousing and distribution, to multichannel sales and fulfillment. Equipped with collaborative Enterprise 2.0 features, such as community blogs and dashboards for peak business performance monitoring, the platform provides customers a peak readiness index to calibrate risks, heat maps to identify peak timing of key business processes, and an implementation review and preparation plan for the next peak season.

The Problem of Peak

Peak shopping season is vital to almost all retailers, yet systems invariably overload. The risk is greater these days because of channel proliferation. In fact, costly downtime during peak seasons is getting worse, even for the largest retailers. Inflexibility is an added problem. During peak buying times, IT teams are unable to flexibly cope with changing business needs such as short-notice promotions, so further opportunity is lost. This is the result of the unfortunate truth that most retailers don’t know their system readiness for peak periods. 

The function of Intellipeak

Intellipeak is an intelligent framework of bundled services for assessing system health and availability under the most stressful and complex scenarios.

A comprehensive risk-mitigation tool, Intellipeak helps a retailer’s IT team accurately assess the peak volume readiness of systems, infrastructure, and all projects. Intellipeak’s diagnosis and monitoring functions are coupled with an accurate Key Performance Index. Weak links are identified then tightened across the entire value chain. Peak dashboard “heat maps” simulate trouble spots and readiness levels through red, amber, and green coding. Its execution areas include:

• Track key business KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) for benchmarking
• Plan proactively to support business needs
• Develop a Peak Implementation Review for all holidays

Customers operating Intellipeak on the Cognizant Collaborative Enterprise 2.0 platform have the advantage of on-demand services to meet unusual spikes in buying activity. Any perceived escalation in traffic that might overwhelm the system can be transferred seamlessly to a technology agnostic virtual infrastructure managed by Cognizant.             

We will continue to invest in growing our eCommerce and Retail infrastructure solutions as well as customer centric solutions in the mobility space.

Nirav Patel, Vice President, Retail Practice, Cognizant                                                                                                                  

Cognizant supported us with peak planning, training, and system health checks and monitoring to make sure it was ‘business as usual’ for Staples, even at the height of the peak season.”

Brian Light, CIO, Staples, Inc.