Meijer shops around for end-user monitoring; Finds unbeatable value in Compuware Vantage

Extraordinary selection, low prices and friendly service have been the cornerstones of Hendrick Meijer's pledge to customers since he opened his first grocery store more than 75 years ago. Today, Meijer's IT department ensures the retail giant continues to deliver on its promises with web-based computing and Compuware Vantage.

Hendrick ran his family-owned shop according to one philosophy, "Give the customers the kind of merchandise, prices and service you would like to see if you were the customer." His philosophy has served Meijer well. The family-operated store has blossomed into a chain of 176 retail supercenters across the U.S. Midwest, offering patrons convenient, one-stop shopping. That type of growth and innovation earned Meijer Progressive Grocer's top honor as "Retailer of the Year." According to the magazine, part of Meijer's progressive appeal is its ability to adapt and innovate.

Meijer's IT department is no exception. When IT members set out to consolidate the corporate infrastructure and convert legacy applications to web-based computing, they needed to rethink the way they would manage application service levels during the transition. "The end-user experience has always been the Holy Grail. People were telling me this is slow or this isn't, but I had no data to measure it," says Tim Osbeck, director of ITS E-Commerce, and formerly the operations manager who participated in the consolidation and conversion project. "We were looking to provide good value, good response time, good availability and good functionality to our customers. Applications that run slower or are altogether unavailable impact our business. Instead of employees out on the sales floor helping guests or stocking shelves, they're in the back room dealing with system issues. That costs our company in productivity and customer satisfaction."

Vantage is the only truth on how applications perform here at Meijer. —Tim Osbeck, Director, ITS E Commerce Meijer

Meijer looked into some competing products. "They didn't quite work. Plus, you're waiting months before they deliver the end product," he says. "Compuware had Vantage up and running in less than a week, delivering results the next day."

Issues Solved Faster, Problems Prevented

Prior to using Vantage, Meijer relied on the help desk to identify slowdowns or unresponsive applications. Since much of the information was anecdotal, it was hard to determine the real issues and tough to pinpoint the source of problems. Vantage changed all that. Meijer combines synthetic transaction monitoring with agentless, appliance-based monitoring for comprehensive, end-user experience measurements. The synthetic approach simulates end-user transactions for continuous, predictable measurements. The agentless approach collects real end-user performance information for web and HTTP-based interactions. As it monitors every transaction, Vantage captures application response times, availability and other key performance metrics anytime, anywhere-without requiring resource-intensive software or devices. Because Meijer's IT members had complete visibility of the infrastructure to see when actual slowdowns occurred, they responded to problems faster and prevented them from impacting the business.

Take, for example, the company's Super Audit application, a web-based system that provides pricing verification information. The application initially had a 500 millisecond response time, but when developers made changes to it, Vantage showed the response time had increased to 2 seconds. "Users started using the application around 6:30, and by 7:30, we knew there was a problem. We fixed it before anybody even started contacting us," he says. "In the old world, it would take weeks before somebody noticed the application was slow. When you're talking 600,000 scans a day with double the response time, it adds up to a lot of lost productivity and cost. Because Vantage kept us focused on the end user's response time, we knew right away about the problem and got the right people working on it when the changes from the day before were still fresh in everybody's mind."

That wasn't always the case at Meijer. Because the retailer often lacked the right metrics, it was tough to determine which team should work the problem. "We could never get everybody to agree on what was slow. The key thing Vantage gives us is quantifiable data," he explains. "We can go directly to the development folks or our business customers and say, 'Look there's an issue and we got the quantifiable data to prove it.' We went from, I think there's a problem to I know there's a problem. That was a quantum leap for Meijer."

Sustaining Service-level Standards

Today when Meijer rolls out applications, the retailer sets its service-level standards by way of Vantage. As Osbeck describes, "Vantage is the best of both worlds. It lets us establish baselines for new applications using synthetic transactions and then allows us to monitor the applications in the real world. When response times get close to exceeding thresholds, Vantage automatically alerts the appropriate team.

"Up until Vantage, I never had any good idea of how many people were using my applications, let alone an application's behaviors. Now we're tracking all this data with Vantage. I know the amount of page views, the number of users that hit at certain times and the average response time-either by day or hour," describes Osbeck. "And the data has been so widely accepted in our department that even our developers ask us to monitor their applications with Vantage, so they can understand the application and how the business uses it."

With proactive measures like these in place, the IT department at Meijer is sure to preserve the same customer-focused tradition on which Hendrick Meijer founded the family business. "Meijer has made a commitment to web-based computing, and the Vantage products play right into that," says Osbeck. "The data is tremendously valuable. So much so that the first thing I do every morning is launch my Vantage dashboard-and then I look at my e-mail. For me, Vantage is the only truth on how applications perform here at Meijer."