‘Waitrose Deliver’ IT team supports business expansion but avoids rise in capital expenditure with Precise Transaction Performance Monitoring (TPM)

Basingstoke, UK – July 8, 2009 – Precise today announced that employee-owned retailer Waitrose, which delivers groceries to consumer homes from around half of its 206 UK stores, is using Precise to maintain the performance and availability of its e-commerce IT infrastructure.

Waitrose held a strategic IT planning exercise last year, ahead of the critical Christmas trading period. This revealed that the retailer would need to increase server capacity by 30-40% to meet increased customer demand. This year the challenge for the food retailer increased because it recently made its “Waitrose Deliver” service free for most orders, meaning it receives a larger numbers of web customer visits all year round.

By using Precise to pinpoint areas for performance improvement, instead of completely replacing its existing IT assets, the retailer is confident that it will be able to achieve better transaction throughput without massive cost increases. 

Bharat Chavda, Waitrose IT project leader explained “Our challenge was to increase performance by 35 per cent to handle the level of increased customer visits.  By using Precise TPM, we were able to drastically improve performance without a commensurate increase in our costs.  Precise will play a key role in helping us to stay ahead of demand.”

The Waitrose team targeted the under-performing SQL statements in its IBM-based e-commerce system and used Precise’s deep-dive abilities to find ways to reduce the amount of processing power needed. Precise’s Performance Management Database (PMDB) also helped Waitrose with capacity planning. This is vital, as during the busy holiday periods, Waitrose Deliver successfully handles as many as 50,000 simultaneous web page views.

Ed Colonna, Vice President of Precise commented: “Our customers want to see transactions completed reliably and quickly for as little cost as possible - even if their transaction volumes rise. In today’s economy our customers are using Precise to improve the efficiency of existing operational systems, rather than ‘throw money’ at short-term hardware fixes. The Waitrose IT team showed great leadership in doing more with less.”
Precise 8.5, the latest release of the TPM product, is now available. Customers can visit www.precise.com or email [email protected] to learn more.