When every minute counts: Resolving a critical incident in record time during peak season
An electrical retailer and aftercare service provider in the EU uses Pointee to quickly identify and fix a critical incident that threatened to disrupt operations during one of the busiest retail seasons of the year
Our client is a leading omnichannel retailer of technology products and services, with hundreds of physical stores in 8 countries. Automation plays a key role in their day-to-day business, enabling them to deliver even during the retail high season and other peaks. However, unexpected problems can appear, and getting to their root cause might be very difficult and time-consuming. This success story is about how Pointee helped the retail business automation team keep their operations running smoothly during one of those peaks.
Challenge
Peak seasons usually generate high volumes of transactions. When you add vacations and sick leaves of several team members to the mix, the lack of resources presents a significant risk and stress for the RPA team.
The client's automation team faced a curious problem during one of those peaks. Processes that worked just fine under normal circumstances suddenly started slowing down. Transactions in the increasingly long backlog started to pile up to the point a critical incident was raised by the business.
Certain seemingly random transactions took up to 25 times the standard duration. This issue impacted most processes in the portfolio. And it kept getting worse.
The automation team had several theories on why it was happening, but validating them would have required several days of work - a luxury the team could not afford.
“It is very difficult for a person to monitor our entire portfolio of robots, let alone look for potential opportunities for optimization. At our scale, it is easy to overlook an issue before it becomes a significant problem for the business.”
Business Process Improvement Manager, CoE
Solution
So the team turned to Pointee for help.
Right away, Pointee automatically detected what the real issue was – due to specific reasons, the average transaction duration kept gradually increasing.
“Thanks to Pointee, we are aware of problematic correlations that we would otherwise never have uncovered.”
Senior Process Automation Specialist, CoE
It was a common pattern across all processes, pointing at an issue in the infrastructure.
“Servers were running 24/7 to handle all the transactions, so the robots had no spare time to catch up with the SLAs. Once we saw the root cause of the issue, we were able to improve scheduling of infrastructure clean up and get back on track fast.”
Senior Process Automation Specialist, CoE
Results
Thanks to Pointee's insights, the team quickly implemented a fix that immediately resolved the issue, preventing several days of unnecessary work validating theories that wouldn’t have led to the root cause anyway.
“Speed was essential. Pointee enabled us to find the root cause in a few moments and helped us avoid wasting several days validating other hypotheses.”
Business Process Improvement Manager, CoE
The immediate resolution of the critical issue ensured compliance with SLAs and saved the automation team a significant amount of precious time and stress.
“Pointee gives us the ability to monitor the performance of all processes in real-time and quickly respond to potential issues before they become escalated as critical incidents.”
Senior Process Automation Specialist, CoE
Conclusion
In the demanding times of peak season, RPA monitoring and optimization software like Pointee can make all the difference in ensuring business continuity, preventing unnecessary work, and saving time and resources. By identifying the root cause of a critical issue in less than 20 minutes, Pointee helped the team meet the SLA and prevent similar issues from occurring in the future.
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