Sporting Goods Chain Conquers Retail Peak Season with Origina’s On-Point Software Maintenance Advice | Retail
CASE STUDIES
4 min read
4 min read
With a history dating back to the 1930s and 250+ locations up and down the U.S. East Coast and across Southeast, this outdoor and sports retail company is a highly recognizable brand that is, in many ways, just getting started. The company differentiates itself with higher-than-average customer engagement rates and an innovative attitude toward location placement.
Investing and retail industry analysts praise the company for its uncommon combination of success and high future growth outlook, two difficult traits to achieve concurrently in a retail sector forever changed by the presence of e-commerce.
Retail
$6.45B Revenue
U.S.
In retail, Black Friday is one important day of a high-volume holiday season. Preparations are an annual ritual that impacts every arm of the business, from the sales floor to the hiring office to the server room.
Every retailer’s infrastructure requires a highly individualized approach, but the final goal is the same everywhere: eliminate as many potential avenues for downtime and slow response as possible. Effective execution spares the business and IT leaders stress, expense, and lost revenue, which can quickly combine to create six- or seven-figure losses in larger companies on top of tarnishing their reputation with customers, especially when the event results in bad press.
Like most retailers, this sporting goods chain had opted to place a change freeze on its technical infrastructure during peak season. Any change can create complex interdependency problems that are impossible to solve quickly during a time where speed matters.
An existing Origina customer, the chain was wrapping up its annual pre-peak preparation towards the end of Q3 2022. Testing indicated that certain legacy infrastructure – including products in the IBM® MQ and InfoSphere family – would struggle to keep pace with predicted increases in sales volume. Knowing that the season was already ramping up and the number of orders would only continue to grow for at least the next two months, the company decided to raise a ticket with Origina to solicit advice on the matter.
Starting with a targeted look at the systems in question, the Origina team was able to pass on a detailed list of review steps they could utilize to gather data and information. Using these statistics from the production environment, including baseline performance and testing specific parameters against expected demand/capacity spikes, the sporting goods retailer could determine how well the infrastructure would perform.
From a proactive hardening perspective, these relatively simple steps gave the chain more room to consider and implement preemptive measures. And from the reactive side, having knowledge of issues that might arise is often all a company needs to squelch them quickly if and when they do show up.
Those points are especially important during a monthslong IT change freeze. Using Origina’s independent third-party software maintenance as an enhanced insurance policy against unsupported and undersupported software issues meant not being stuck between a rock and a hard place if problems did occur – important peace of mind that turned into tangible value as the season intensified.
Even without what some would consider a necessary amount of runway, this retailer was able to use our contextual advice to great effect. Alongside a highly successful, high-uptime 2022 peak season, this year’s large volume months have seen far fewer tickets opened with Origina because the guidance we provided is applicable for as long as their infrastructure is maintained in its present state.
In a recent third-party customer service review, this retailer gave Origina a 10/10 satisfaction score.
By partnering with Origina to reduce their peak season IT concerns, the sporting good and outdoor retailer achieved:
A path towards stable performance during a high-volume season – now and for as long as they want to keep the software they currently have
On-the-spot independent support for IBM® and HCL® software issues, including competitive guaranteed response rates, that might arise during busy moments
Expert software maintenance advice during change freezes, modernization projects, and everything in between
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