Innovation Journal - Cognizant

RETHINK - INTELLIPEAK
challenge, especially since last year, the systems had suffered outages
due to heavy loads.
He turned to the Client Partner from Cognizant to see what could be
done to ensure things went more smoothly this holiday season by
proactively identifying and addressing all risks related to the peak
shopping period upfront.
Cognizant’s Client Partner discussed this situation on his weekly call
"With the help of Cognizant's extensive peak management and
technology expertise, we were able to provide a seamless experience
to our customers. Cognizant supported us with peak planning,
training and system health checks and monitoring to make
sure it was 'business as usual' for Staples, even at the height of
the peak season.”
Brian Light, CIO, Staples, Inc.
with Cognizant’s “Two-In-A-Box” offshore delivery director and his
team. The team had already been reviewing the lessons learned from
the prior holiday season and had some ideas percolating. As the
meeting went on, they recalled what Cognizant CEO Francisco
D’Souza had said about the retail industry: “When you put the
challenges of the peak shopping season together with the main
business drivers for retailers today -- customer intimacy and channel
expansion -- it presents a huge opportunity.”
By the end of the meeting, it was clear that the goal should be to
enable retailers to manage key risks and achieve trouble-free, highvolume
sales during the peak shopping season by assessing the
readiness of business processes, IT systems and the underlying IT
infrastructure. Such a solution should cover all the key business
processes and assets, and it should support the entire retail lifecycle,
including merchandising, warehousing and distribution, and
multichannel sales and fulfillment.
A few weeks later, the Client Partner met with the retailer’s CIO, VP of
Marketing along with their team, as they were just beginning to plan
promotions and branding for the holiday season. As he started to
present the overview of Cognizant’s solution, they were excited about
its prospects.
The solution, dubbed Intellipeak, was capable of evaluating the
retailer’s preparedness for the peak sales season, thus enabling them
to manage key risks and achieve trouble-free high-volume sales by
assessing the readiness of the business processes in place. Moreover,
it would assess the readiness of all the IT systems and the underlying
infrastructure, across the entire retail lifecycle.
He further explained that Intellipeak included KPIs and diagnostic tools
to check out weak links across the retailer’s systems and strengthen
these weaknesses across the value chain. Furthermore, peak
dashboards and heat maps were available that simulated trouble spots
and indicated readiness levels through red, amber and green color
codes.
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