When user adoption is dependent on initial high performance, a multinational tobacco company called on Mercury to assess the system.
What does a company do to ensure that its multimillion-rand investment operates optimally? What if it is imperative that there is a high user uptake as it has been shown that initial performance problems result in low uptake and a high probability of low user return? Globally, businesses are recognising the answer - to test and fine-tune the application to ensure that it is operating at optimal level.
British American Tobacco South Africa (BAT South Africa) has implemented an Enterprise Information Platform (EIP), providing employees with a single access point to applications, information and knowledge. British American Tobacco is the second largest tobacco company in the world with operations in more than 180 countries across the globe. In SA alone, the company employs more than 2 600 people of which 30% are mobile and use mobile computing devices. BAT South Africa produces more than 25 billion cigarettes a year and enjoys 92% market share of the local cigarette industry.
In this environment, with a large employee base and a large geographical area to cover, communication and integration is essential. The South African division had created an EIP that allowed for internal collaboration and access to internal applications, as well as content, information feeds, online help and user support, cross-platform search capabilities, personalisation and notification.
William Howard, technical project manager within the tobacco organisation, has long-term experience with Web-based enterprise-wide applications and knew that the system needed to operate at an optimal level if it was to be a success. While the application is not mission-critical, the investment was high and the efficiency outcomes important. Thus user acceptance was critical.
Prior to roll-out, the application, while at a functional level, still needed to be assessed for system performance. This included assessing the system capacity to support projected concurrency and usage and isolating performance bottlenecks in configuration, content, infrastructure and database. The performance targets included: 2 500 total users with a concurrency of 300; an initial response time of less than eight seconds; benchmarking the SAP Enterprise Portal performance; and identifying important response time guidelines. The EIP had to operate at optimum levels within its J2EE architecture. The Web server being MS IIS, the Application Server SAP EP5.5 on WAS6.20 and the database Oracle 9i.
Here Mercury stepped in with Active Tune, a proven service for tuning and optimising production systems across an entire operation. As an international operation, Mercury has already conducted over 3 000 tuning engagements and had delivered an average performance improvement of over 100%.
After initial qualification, assessment, R&D and scoping exercises, the first step was to benchmark the application behaviour. "Benchmarking is essential," says Jako Smith, technical manager at Mercury South Africa. "It`s important to grade how the application performs under real-world conditions. This means modelling the application according to the business processes in all environments. This patterning allows one to check where the bottlenecks exist, sort these out and then rerun a benchmark test, refining the performance. Bottlenecks may `move` to another level at each refining stage, thus tuning needs to be done systematically to ensure total optimisation."
Infrastructure problems included a WAN dependency, server memory shortage and network card configurations. The application problems were J2EE memory configurations, performance below IIS parameters, virus software interaction, image sizes and number of iViews. Database problems were in the tuning settings. The solutions included adding a server and reconfiguring network cards. The virus checking policies were changed so that checks did not run during high peak times. Image files were compressed and the number of views on the portal addressed.
"The project was a success and we were extremely satisfied," says Howard. He noted that key success factors included excellent collaboration with the technical project team, highly organised tuning sessions with an efficient change management process for tuning recommendations, a predefined schedule of tuning sessions, defined goals for each session, as well as J2EE expertise.
"We were able to go live, confident that the load on the servers and application would not cause a performance problem which would have been detrimental to the adoption of the system by our employees," concludes Howard.
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