Waitrosehas increased the capacity
and performance of its website without increasing costs, by
analysing which areas needed improvement instead of replacing
systems.
The retailer studied its e-commerce infrastructure last year and
found it needed to increase its server capacity by 30-40% to keep
up with
growing online demand.
The company recently made delivery free for most online orders,
which has increased web traffic. At peak times
the website
handles around 50,000 page views at a time.
By working out which parts of its infrastructure needed
improvement, instead of replacing equipment, it is hoping to
improve performance without increasing costs.
Waitrose targeted the under-performing SQL statements in its
IBM-based e-commerce system and used a performance management
database to find ways to reduce the amount of processing power
needed.
Bharat Chavda, Waitrose IT project leader, said, "Our challenge
was to increase performance by 35% to handle the level of increased
customer visits. We were able to drastically improve performance
without a commensurate increase in our costs."
The retailer used software from
Precise to tackle the problem
and analyse where the weaknesses were.