TCS ignio™ AIOps Helps Belk Secure AI Edge for Operations

Overview

Belk is a renowned US department store operator with over 290 stores.

In addition, they have a thriving e-commerce platform, and two data centers, along with a growing cloud presence. Belk's partnership with TCS began over a decade ago with foundational infrastructure support, evolving into a transformative journey that redefined their IT landscape. A landmark achievement of this project was the elimination of the mainframe environment, delivering significant cost savings and paving the way for a modernized, agile IT ecosystem.

However, despite these advancements, Belk's IT operations continued to face complexities:

• The environment is built on heterogeneous technologies, spanning legacy systems, cloud platforms, and a mix of commercial and custom applications. This posed a challenge for unified monitoring and management.
• The IT operations team supports nearly 20,000 Belk employees and handles 36,000 tickets annually. However, the team is heavily burdened with manual 'eyes-on-glass' monitoring and repetitive tasks.
• Limited automation and fragmented tooling reduced visibility and responsiveness, impacting system availability and business continuity.
• Valuable resources are consumed by routine activities, leaving less time for proactive problem resolution and innovation.

These complexities underscored the need for a more intelligent, automated, and integrated operations model to drive a more perceptive approach and support Belk's evolving business needs.

AI-backed solution

For over a decade, TCS has been a strategic partner for Belk, delivering projects in IT operations, application, and technology transformations.

TCS collaborated with Belk to transform their operating model using the Machine First Delivery Model (MFDM™) enabled by TCS Digitate ignio™ AIOps platform. The AI-driven solution:

• Automated over 290 use cases using ignio to proactively monitor store operations, conduct health checks, automate infrastructure patching, ensure security compliance, and minimize dependence on frontline touch services
• Established an always-on store dashboard for real-time insights into key store metrics
• Deployed Application360 machine learning (ML) prediction models to monitor store, ecommerce, and supply chain transactions in near real time. This enabled proactive alerts for pattern changes like edge cases in tender authorization failures, and ecommerce order trends
• Automated secure sockets layer (SSL) certificate monitoring and renewal processes

Ensured business service level agreement (SLA) monitoring of over 9,000 jobs using WLM (workload management) module.

Dynamic retail

In the fast-paced world of department store retail, operational agility and system reliability are critical to remain perceptive.

Aided by TCS's deep domain expertise and thought leadership, Belk successfully implemented the ignio AIOps platform to transform its IT operations into a more perceptive, intelligent, responsive, and cost-effective model.

The TCS team brought the right blend of skills, experience, and diligence to ensure a seamless rollout of ignio, delivering measurable outcomes that directly supported Belk's business goals.

Belk reaped multiple benefits from the initiative:

• 15% reduction in operating expenditure through a reimagined IT operating model
• 58% of incidents proactively covered through AI-powered monitoring, reducing firefighting
• 40% decrease in manual monitoring costs, freeing up resources for higher-value tasks
• 10% year-over-year reduction in ticket volume, aligned with operational targets
• Real-time visibility into store transactions, enabling faster response and issue resolution
• Improved operational efficiency, minimizing the business impact of unexpected disruptions
• 90% reduction in store outages, including issues like pricing inaccuracies, register downtimes, and missing sales transactions

This transformation has made Belk's IT operations more resilient, scalable, and aligned with the demands of modern retail.