Travis Perkins plc slashes website downtime by over two-thirds with Dynatrace

Website problems emerge following the move in-house

Builders’ merchant, Travis Perkins plc, was traditionally focused on selling building materials to traders. It then expanded into the B2C space, with the £950m acquisition of consumer brand, Wickes. With Wickes facing fierce competition in the DIY market, Travis Perkins plc needed to deliver innovation through new e-commerce features while ensuring consumers experienced a faultless experience. The company decided the best way to do this was to bring the management of its e-commerce platform, SAP Hybrid, in-house so that it could have greater control.

“This was our first serious foray into online, and we really experienced challenges in keeping up with the business growth” E-Commerce Operations Team Leader, Abdul al Tayib explains. “With large numbers of customers on the site, we were dealing with website outages and degraded service for our customers. We had no way of monitoring performance, so we’d often only learn that there was a problem when customers services rang in to complain.”

‘Eye-opening’ application insights from Dynatrace

The IT team was constantly being reactive when it came to resolving problems and had little visibility into why or where the problems were occurring. Tayib adds: “We were fishing in the dark as we couldn’t really get into the guts of the e-commerce platform and see what was going on inside. It was incredibly difficult and time-consuming to find and fix the cause of problems, which became at times stressful and demoralizing for the IT team.”

The Wickes website was successful in launching B2C e-commerce but as the volume of transactions increased so did performance and reliability issues, and it was evident that the IT team needed an observability solution that went beyond just traditional monitoring. Dynatrace was the only solution that could offer the level of granularity and intelligence Travis Perkins plc was looking for.

“The only way to describe our impressions of Dynatrace is ‘eye-opening’. It was the first opportunity we’d ever had to really understand what our applications were doing. The Dynatrace platform blew us away and it was great to see that as technology environments have been redefined, so has Dynatrace’s observability platform. Ultimately, it has given us the ability to understand what the experience is like for every user, across every transaction going through the website as though we were sitting there with them.”

Dynatrace was able to get Travis Perkins plc up and running fast through its cloud and professional services. “Our website is already hosted in AWS, so we were up and running on Dynatrace’s SaaS solution within hours,” said Tayib. “The Dynatrace team helped us build out the custom dashboards that we needed to support our operations enabling us to gain the full value from day one.”

AI pinpoints root cause to drastically reduce downtime

Dynatrace integrated observability platform powered by AI and automation enables Travis Perkins to examine thousands of pieces of performance data and instantly pinpoint the root cause of any problems. This is helping Travis Perkins to fix issues before users are impacted.

“Moving from being reactive to proactive is a key goal for us and the AI capabilities of Dynatrace have exceeded what we thought was possible. We are now able to spot problems and identify the precise configuration change needed to stabilize the website before customers feel any impact,” said Tayib.

As a result, Travis Perkins has been able to reduce website downtime by two-thirds and reduce the time it takes to resolve performance issues by 75 percent. “Dynatrace has allowed us to completely reevaluate how we work; it enables us to truly grasp the factors that impact the customer experience,” adds Tayib. “If there’s a problem, we can see how many customers were actually affected and what effect that had on revenues, so we can fully understand the business impact. But luckily, thanks to the AI capabilities in Dynatrace, the number of problems that actually impact customers has drastically reduced.”

Supporting the switch to DevOps

Travis Perkins plc sees Dynatrace as a vital component as it transitions to DevOps. Tayib explains, “We plan to roll out Dynatrace across our testing environments so that our development teams can access the same performance data and automation capabilities as our ops team can. This will be vital in supporting continuous development workflows, allowing us to rapidly improve the quality of the code being created. Ultimately, this will help us bring new digital services to market, faster and transform the way we do business,” he concludes.