Woolworths Group is made up of some of Australia’s most recognizable and trusted retail brands, serving millions of customers every day across their network.
Si Thu, Senior Manager for Payment Operations, shared how they use IR’s solutions to maximize visibility and availability of their payments environment, to ensure great customer experiences.
The problem
Across their retail stores, petrol stations and through their partners, Woolworths Group process around 4 million transactions per day on average, and at peak times this can almost double. Their environment must be highly visible and highly available, and when something goes wrong it needs to be resolved fast, before customers are impacted.
Woolworths Group are a 24/7 business and aim for 100% uptime, but with so many different components, applications, and merchants to manage, there is always the potential for issues to arise. Si’s team are the first responders.
The solution
Woolworths Group use IR Transact and IR Infrastructure, powered by Prognosis, to monitor their Connex payment switch and NonStop infrastructure, which processes the millions of daily transactions that move through their environment.
The benefit
Si rates visualization as critical to staying on top of the health of their systems. They have eight IR dashboards displayed on screens around their flight deck monitoring their most important performance indicators, like overall transaction volumes and transactions per second (TPS), so they can see immediately if things don't look right.
“Being able to see how things are trending is so important because that’s the first step in identifying an issue. And being able to quickly interpret what the issue might be is essential,” says Si. “If I receive an alert with error code 1234 – what does that mean? But when we look at the dashboards you can clearly see it. Having that visual representation to tell you immediately a) there is a problem and b) the problem is occurring in this system, is crucial to getting ahead of the issue.”
Other teams then leverage IR's solutions to troubleshoot and investigate the root-cause of the issue, so they can solve it, understand why it happened, and work towards preventing future occurrences.
The insights Si's team gains from IR's solutions help them with capacity planning and future performance management.
“IR shows me what’s currently going on, as well as what has been going on, at different times of the day or week,” Si explained. “Because we have this historical data, we get deeper insight into performance, which means we can get better at spotting anomalies and keeping on top of things.”
It also means they can more effectively plan for future requirements. Si’s team use IR to analyze their vast quantities of transaction data and often share insights with other areas of the business to ensure they can deliver maximum availability and, ultimately, the best possible experience for their millions of customers.
Si Thu
Senior Manager for Payment Operations, Woolworths Group
