Benefits of APM and BTM for Retail Stores   by Denise Rutledge

in Business / Product Reviews    (submitted 2010-11-22)

Every retail business needs some form of supply chain management in place in order to have the goods necessary to meet demand without unnecessary warehouse carrying costs. In fact, as the number of stores expand and grow, the need to better match supply with demand increases. This is especially true in terms of the IT infrastructure needed to run supply chain applications and to monitor that everything is running with the appropriate performance and availability. This is where application performance management and business transaction management come into play.

The Impact of Business Transaction Management

Business transaction management (BTM) provides information to retail stores that simply cannot be gained by using the software management tools that come with each separate application that handles the diverse types of transactions typical of every retail store. For example, BTM provides deep visibility into the transactions running such as orders placed, payments, backorders, support requests, logistics and where certain orders are in the fulfillment process. When these transactions fail, behave incorrectly or run slow, automatically alerts are provided detailing the root cause of the failure.

In other words, a solid BTM solution will give the IT team visibility into every transaction that takes place inside the business. With a complex IT system, this is paramount. It lets the business grow as quickly as demand is driving growth, while also streamlining the current methods that are in place. On top of this, BTM can also prevent problems from occurring and analyze those that do occur for rapid mean time to know (MTTK).


APM Significance for Retail Businesses

Application performance management is significant as it lets a business monitor the performance of the transactions on an ongoing basis. As there are usually many levels of applications involved in the system, it is important that they are able to communicate with each other in order for the business to run smoothly. A good APM solution will let applications share information with one another so everything works to support the supply chain management.

For example, APM can monitor supply chain events such as order flow, inventory, incoming shipments and outgoing shipments. On top of this, a very good BTM/APM solution will also provide other benefits such as monitoring delivery and service scheduling, warehouse inventory, logistics, orders, and finished product management.


Complex Event Processing

Complex event processing (CEP) is a very valuable tool for retail stores. It is a tool that can be used as the core of BTM and APM solutions. The reason for doing this is very simple. CEP correlates the massive amounts of data collected during BTM and APM processes. This ability to correlate data to real-time events enables predictive alerting about problems before they impact the supply chain process. This means it is capable of providing the needs of managers and others inside the company.

A very good system will also be able to deal with and predict changes in the IT environment that will have an impact on the efficiency of the IT functions. This means that it will alert IT staff when it sees patterns emerging that are not normal for the retail business. In effect, this stops problems before they "blow up" and impact end-users such as customers or the associates dealing with customers. It is always better to prevent mission critical breakdowns than to be putting out "fires".

Nastel Technologies offers an application performance management/ business transaction management solution that is recognized by some of the largest manufacturers and retail businesses in the world as their solution of choice. It is called AutoPilot.

AutoPilot has a core complex event processing engine that makes it especially efficient at deep-dive diagnostics, predictive notifications and end-to-end transaction tracking. For both APM and BTM solutions, AutoPilot assures that today's complex IT environment keeps on handling your business transactions smoothly and profitably.

About the Author

Denise Rutledge enjoys researching and writing about many topics including financial and business topics. Denise also works with clients to develop website content, with a focus on writing materials that develop brand and trust through valuable, easy to read information. Learn more by visiting her website at http://writingasaghost.com.