Johannesburg, 10 Mar 2017
If you're craving a made-from-scratch meal featuring fresh, high-quality ingredients, one of Snap Kitchen's 50 stores probably has just what you're looking for. Each day, Snap Kitchen stocks its shelves with a selection of tasty, healthy breakfasts, lunches, dinners, snacks, and beverages.
If your dietary needs include gluten-free, dairy-free, vegetarian, vegan, or Paleo foods, you'll find plenty of entries that fit the bill. If you're following a specific weight-loss or nutritional reset programme, like Weight Watchers or Whole30, Snap Kitchen offers a variety of choices that make it easy to stay on your plan.
Although most people don't think about hi-tech when they're shopping at Snap Kitchen, technology plays a crucial role in enabling our employees to have exactly the right ingredients on hand, prepare thousands of menu items daily, and keep stores stocked with the right mix of products. It's the job of IT to provide the information systems that track inventory, capture point-of-sale data, generate management reports, and generally run the business day to day.
Keeping critical systems running is a big job for Snap Kitchen's small IT staff. There are 10 in the team. They get the job done by putting together the right combination of cloud-based systems - for example, Snap Kitchen's point-of-sale (POS) system from Task Retail Technology and Microsoft Azure virtual infrastructure. So, when Snap Kitchen wanted to add monitoring capabilities to ensure high availability of critical servers, it was clear a cloud-based solution was the way to go.
Snap Kitchen was looking for a basic monitoring agent to monitor CPU, disk storage, and other resources, and notify the company of any issues. Snap Kitchen also wanted a customisable, real-time view into what's happening in its environment. Snap Kitchen evaluated the top software as a service (SaaS) solutions and selected TrueSight Pulse because of its functionality, simplicity and affordability.
Monitoring what matters to the business
Reporting is particularly important to running the Snap Kitchen business successfully. It has approximately a dozen servers that it updates daily with sales data from the stores to support the generation of management reports. Snap Kitchen's managers run queries on the data throughout the day to understand what menu items are selling and where. That visibility drives decisions around how many of each menu item to prepare and what quantities of each item to ship to each store.
Without these reports, the company might produce too many of some items - products that would be pulled from the shelves because they didn't sell before the expiration date - and too few of other items - which means customers may not find their favourite items on the shelf. At one point, Snap Kitchen's surplus numbers were higher than it would have liked, which affected profitability. Its database engineers brought the surplus under control by developing sophisticated formulas for analysing sales data and identifying trends with respect to which items are selling well and which are not - and where they sell or don't. As a result, management can more accurately forecast the right mix of menu items each kitchen should make and the right mix of items to ship to each store.
Snap Kitchen's SQL servers are critical resources that it must monitor to avoid any reporting-related disruptions. The POS system run by Task is also critical. Any store outage means a loss in sales and sales data. Trying to check out customers without the POS system would be cumbersome, and Snap Kitchen wouldn't be able to capture the critical sales metrics that provide visibility into each store's inventory. That kind of lapse could affect the kitchens and stores for several days.
Pulse keeps tabs on Snap Kitchen's servers and sends the company notifications when issues are starting to arise. Ensuring the company has adequate disk space available on its SQL servers is particularly important. Before Pulse, the company often ran out of space. Now Pulse monitors storage capacity and alerts Snap Kitchen's help desk via e-mail when the capacity reaches specific thresholds. As a result, it is avoiding conditions that might interfere with reporting.
Pulse also played a role in pinpointing a disk space problem with Snap Kitchen's POS server. The nightly backup process was creating large files that consumed a gigantic amount of disk space. It was able to give the vendor precise information on when it was happening, so steps could be put in place to ensure that adequate space was available during that time.
Going mobile
Monitoring has become more crucial since rolling out its new mobile app. Now customers are able to place orders from their mobile phones and the orders will be ready and waiting for them when they stop at the store.
To meet customer needs, that app must have access to live inventory for each store, and Snap Kitchen has to feed orders to the stores immediately so they can pull the right items and package them for pickup. That means its servers must be running reliably, seven days a week, even on holidays - not only when stores are open but any time a customer might place an order.
On the horizon
Monitoring has become a 24/7/365 job at Snap Kitchen. The beauty of TrueSight Pulse is that it constantly monitors the environment, so Snap Kitchen doesn't have to. It enables the company to keep tabs on the infrastructure with a very small IT staff.
In addition, the solution positions Snap Kitchen to support its corporate goals for growth. Over the next year, Snap Kitchen plans to grow rapidly. That growth will require increasing the size of its infrastructure. That means ramping up production and distribution efforts, which will also require growth in the infrastructure. With TrueSight Pulse, Snap Kitchen can monitor a growing IT environment without adding a lot of staff to get the job done.
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