Mutiny Blog

In recent years network monitoring has evolved, from simply watching traditional infrastructure devices, such as workstations, servers, printers and switches to encompassing a world of additional devices which you may not necessarily assume would be compatible. New sensors and devices allow the expansion of monitoring solutions, to not just provide information on network throughput, SAN health and downtime, but to provide a great depth of visibility across sites, allowing the tracking of movements, temperatures and even humidity.

Additionally, the advent of fast connections and cloud technology has made it easier than ever to manage multiple sites and even mobile units in one place.

Advantages to retailers.

Retail stores provide the perfect environment to implement centralised monitoring. A number of our retail customers such as Mamas and Papas and WingYip are currently using Mutiny to monitor more than just their infrastructure.

Benefits of network monitoring to retailers:

Improve customer service: Central to every retail business is the customer experience, making sure this is a reflection of the business and its brand, that they receive exceptional service, and come back.

Ensuring this requires a number of aspects:

• The availability of product: Purchasing, stock control and logistics systems are now central to the successful operation of large retailers. Ensuring these solutions are up and running is paramount to ordering the correct stock and ensuring it gets distributed to the right sites. Network monitoring can keep an eye on these systems, warn of any anomalies and ensure issues are resolved before they affect the business.

• The availability of customer centric systems: These include everything from the workstations and printers on the customer service desk, foot-fall counters, through to the scales they use to weigh their goods to the till systems they use to pay and even customer Wifi. Ensuring that these are up and working is paramount to the customer experience, centralised monitoring can alert the IT team when anything goes down, or is about to fail allowing them to immediately react.

• Ensuring a pleasant environment: Temperature and environmental monitoring devices have multiple uses, from a technical standpoint they can be used to ensure temperatures and humidity within server rooms are kept within acceptable limits, and failure is kept to a minimum. Within a shop floor environment, the same technology can be used to ensure that customers are comfortable through constant monitoring and adjustment of air conditioning units.

• Ensuring product quality: Further to the previous point, temperature monitoring technology can be used to monitor fridges and ensure food is kept within its optimal temperature range. This consistent monitoring ensures food is at its best and prevents wastage. The collection and constant graphing can be used to automatically produce reports and remove the human element needed to provide temperature recording.

Further benefits can be seen from an operational standpoint:

Staff and public security: Centralised monitoring attached to door access controls and clocking in machines means you always know who is on site and the time is synchronised on the clocks.

Regulatory compliance: Understanding who is on site can support the company in ensuring it adheres to regulations (such as Fire and working time directives) and monitor staff movements.

Save costs and improve efficiency: Centralised monitoring removes the need to have an IT team presence at each site and reduces salary costs. Constant monitoring also reduces the need for periodical manual checking saving on man time and freeing people to work on other more important tasks.

Conclusion:

As you can see, the benefits of centralised monitoring far exceed core infrastructure monitoring alone . New technology can be used to improve the customer experience and keep retailers running smoothly and profitably.

If you are a retailer considering a network monitoring solution talk to us first. With our experience in your sector we can go through your options and you may be surprised at the possibilities which are available.

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