Testimonials

How do we make progress in our
strategic plan to have an operation
automated within 5 years

How do we make progress in our
strategic plan to have an operation
automated within 5 years

Cencosud case study

We are happy with the use of 24Cevent, we had a significant improvement in the efficiency of the process, reducing the times and errors we had before.

Cencosud is one of the top three retailers in South America. With more than 55 years since its beginnings in 1963, it already has more than a thousand stores in its different business areas and more than 65 Shopping Centers, a figure that will continue to grow.

In line with the current load and growth expectations, the Systems and Operations management set itself the mission of automating the operation within 5 years, incorporating 24Cevent in 2021 to its suite of solutions that allow it to advance in this objective.

Two years after its implementation, we met with Ivan Flores, Sr. Cencosud Delivery Lead, who led the implementation of this solution and is in charge of the monitoring team and incident notification team.

Expectation of implementation

One of the main objectives of the 24Cevent implementation was the automation of the “dispatcher” role, the team in charge of looking at the alarms on the different monitoring screens (4 check_mk + 1 nagios), filtering the important alarms and then determining the team on duty and notifying them by phone.

Main problems of the dispatcher role

Recurring problems in the operation, mainly due to:

  • Differences in criteria, arbitrarily deciding that the alarm was not relevant, and then ending up in incidents that impacted the operation.

  • Alarms without notification due to high volume, human error, another alert was generated while they were on the phone notifying the first one, among others of the same type.

Main benefits 24Cevent

The platform allowed us to successfully automate the dispatcher’s role within the organization. Today we replaced level 1 notification with 24Cevent, among the functions that stand out the most are:

  • Automatic notifications with call in Spanish
  • Decision matrix to decide when and to which resolution team to notify.
  • Escalations in case of no answer
  • Integration with our help desk, automatic ticket closing.
  • Monitoring/Tracking of alerts

Implementation difficulties

One of the main decision factors we had during the evaluation process was that the solution should be agnostic to the monitoring tool and that it should be easily integrated. In this line 24Cevent met all expectations, the implementation was very fast and we had great support from 24Cevent’s professional services team.

The biggest difficulty was getting the level 2 teams used to receiving automatic notifications instead of human calls, there was a lot of cultural work we had to do, but it was totally worth it.

Additionally, we also had difficulties at the beginning due to the high volume of alerts, but it was precisely this visibility that allowed us to take actions to eliminate false positives and leave what was really important. To achieve this, the daily reports provided by the 24Cevent team were fundamental, thanks to which we now only have significant alerts that add value to the business.

Conclusions

We are happy with the use of 24Cevent, we had a significant improvement in the efficiency of the process, reducing the times and errors we had before.

I would like to emphasize that the professional support service was excellent, especially in complex automation projects such as this one. We had several challenges particular to our business, which were quickly incorporated into the product roadmap and developed in a very reasonable timeframe. Today we even have additional functions that were not available at the time of contracting, such as an uptime dashboard for each of our lines of business, which consolidates multiple individual alarms into a single business indicator.

Time saved searching for incidents
80%
Improved productivity
68%
Incidents solved on time
98%