The client is a leading multinational retail chain with over 45 stores across North America and Europe, delivering a seamless shopping experience through both physical and digital channels. The company operates a vast retail network, managing store operations, supply chain logistics, and customer interactions at scale.
With a focus on delivering high-quality service, optimizing store performance, and enhancing customer experience, the retailer strives to maintain smooth day-to-day operations. Ensuring accurate inventory, fast checkout, and reliable store operations remains a top priority to sustain growth and competitive advantage.
By prioritizing innovation and operational excellence, the company continues to evolve its retail ecosystem to meet changing market demands and improve business efficiency.
Reason for Collaboration
Managing store operations, inventory, and supply chain logistics across hundreds of locations became increasingly complex for the retailer. Frequent IT disruptions affected checkout systems, inventory tracking, and in-store technology, leading to operational slowdowns and customer dissatisfaction.
The company relied on manual processes and fragmented IT workflows, making it difficult to detect and resolve issues proactively. Without a centralized system to monitor and manage IT operations, response times were slow, and inefficiencies grew.
To keep stores running smoothly, reduce downtime, and improve efficiency, the company turned to experts for help. They needed a way to simplify IT operations, fix issues faster, and get a clear, real-time view of their entire retail network.
Challenges
Inventory Disruptions Due to IT System Failures: The inventory management system depended on IT infrastructure for real-time stock tracking and replenishment. However, server outages and data synchronization failures prevented timely updates, causing discrepancies between actual stock levels and what appeared in the system. This led to stockouts, misplaced inventory, and lost sales opportunities, frustrating customers who couldn’t find the products they needed.
IT Performance Bottlenecks During High-Demand Periods: During peak sales periods such as holidays, flash sales, and major promotions, transaction volumes surged beyond system capacity. The IT infrastructure lacked scalability, causing slow payment processing, delayed order fulfilment, and long checkout lines. This negatively impacted the shopping experience, leading to abandoned purchases, customer dissatisfaction, and potential revenue loss.
Different IT Systems in Different Stores: Each store operated on different IT configurations, legacy systems, and custom workflows, making it difficult to standardize processes. Without a centralized IT operations framework, troubleshooting and resolving issues across multiple locations became inefficient. IT teams lacked unified visibility, delaying response times and increasing operational complexity.
Unmonitored Smart Retail Device Failures: The retailer relied on self-checkout kiosks, digital price tags, and smart shelves to enhance the in-store experience. However, unmonitored device failures went unnoticed until customers or store staff reported issues. The absence of real-time monitoring and predictive maintenance led to service disruptions, negatively impacting operational efficiency and customer satisfaction.
Solutions
To optimize IT operations, ensure seamless retail performance, and enhance customer experience, our experts implemented ServiceNow IT Operations Management (ITOM) as a centralized, proactive solution. The following outlines the key implementations:
Real-Time Inventory System Monitoring to Prevent Stockouts: Our experts implemented and integrated ServiceNow ITOM with the retailer’s inventory management system, enabling real-time monitoring of the underlying IT infrastructure. By continuously tracking server performance, database health, and network stability, we ensured that any disruptions to the inventory system were detected instantly. Automated alerts were configured to notify IT teams of potential failures before they could impact stock updates. As a result, the retailer significantly reduced stockout incidents caused by IT issues, ensuring that products were always available for customers.
AI-Powered IT Event Correlation to Prevent Checkout Slowdowns: To mitigate IT slowdowns during peak shopping periods, our experts deployed AIOps-driven Event Management in ServiceNow ITOM. We configured AI-based pattern recognition to analyze transaction volumes, CPU utilization, payment gateway performance, and network congestion in real-time. Automated threshold-based alerts were implemented to detect early signs of system stress, enabling IT teams to take preventive action including pre-emptive server load balancing, auto-scaling of cloud resources based on forecasted demand, etc., before checkout slowdowns occurred. Predictive scaling strategies optimized system performance during high-traffic events, ensuring seamless digital payments and a frictionless checkout experience.
Unified IT Visibility Across All Retail Locations: We deployed a centralized Configuration Management Database (CMDB) to consolidate IT asset tracking and governance across all store locations. By integrating CMDB with automated Discovery, we mapped every IT component—including POS systems, cloud services, local servers, and network devices—to their respective stores. This provided IT teams with a single source of truth, eliminating inconsistencies in troubleshooting and maintenance. Standardized IT configurations and governance policies were enforced across all locations, reducing incident resolution times and ensuring seamless store operations.
IoT Device Monitoring and Predictive Maintenance for Retail Technology: We integrated ServiceNow ITOM with computing sensors deployed across smart retail devices, including self-checkout stations, digital kiosks, and smart shelves. The system continuously monitored device health, tracking anomalies such as unexpected slowdowns, power fluctuations, or connectivity issues. Using predictive analytics, ServiceNow detected patterns indicating potential failures and triggered automated maintenance workflows before issues affected customers. This proactive approach significantly reduced downtime, improved the reliability of in-store technology, and enhanced the overall shopping experience.
Benefits
- Real-time IT monitoring prevented inventory system failures, ensuring product availability and minimizing lost sales.
- AI-driven event correlation eliminated slowdowns during peak hours, ensuring faster transactions and reduced customer wait times.
- Standardized IT Operations Across Locations: A centralized CMDB provided complete IT asset visibility, leading to faster issue resolution and improved IT governance.
- Increased Uptime for Smart Retail Devices: IoT monitoring enabled predictive maintenance, reducing unexpected failures and enhancing in-store customer experiences.
