Try RevDeBug in action for free. Jump into our interactive demo >

Case study: How Rossmann increased observability and reduced supply chain disruption with RevDeBug

|

By RevDeBug

About Rossmann

Rossmann is one of the biggest drug and cosmetics chains in Europe with more than 4000 shops across the continent. The Polish branch, with over 1600 shops, is one of the most recognizable brands in Poland, according to YouGov BrandIndex. It was also the highest-rated retail chain in 2019, as reported by OC&C Strategy Consultants.

What challenge was Rossmann facing?

To operate its retail chain, Rossmann uses software that monitors and coordinates the supply of products across Poland. Logistic centers across Poland, that operate 24/7, are the heaviest users of the system.

Rossmann’s stores in Poland are serviced by three logistic points in Łódź, Grudziądz and Pyskowice. If an error occurs in any of those centers, it can lead to deliveries being suspended and significant losses for the company.

To ensure a streamlined approach to product deliveries, having an errorless system that manages the supply chain is of vital importance to the retailer.

At the moment, when Rossmann is actively engaged in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic, for instance by increasing the stock of cleaning products, it needs to be able to fix any error as soon as it occurs and ensure an uninterrupted supply system.

In most cases, Rossmann’s systems work flawlessly, but problems arise when an error comes up on production, especially late at night.

Since the retailers’ software monitoring was limited to the iterative level, bugs were elusive and hard to fix.

Why Rossmann decided to work with RevDebug

Rossmann’s aim was to eliminate errors in the production environment and minimize interruptions in the supply chain.

The company invested in additional measures to face this challenge with an iterative approach. Some developers have even been assigned on night duty to monitor the system and react in case an error occurred.

When errors did appear, however, it was very difficult to recreate them as they would come up only once in a while. Despite the immediate attempts to remedy the situation, the very fact that bugs did appear led to negative outcomes.

With this in mind, Rossmann decided to approach RevDeBuga nd get access to a solution that provides monitoring and bug fixing on production, aiming for full observability across premises.

“At Rossmann, we have started focusing strongly on the monitoring of many different processes. RevDeBug is a platform that perfectly addressed our needs.”

– Piotr Jugiel, Head of the IT Business Systems Development Department at Rossmann

Rossmann and RevDeBug: the results of the cooperation

The goal that drove the implementation of RevDeBug was to allow the recording of production failures, providing detailed information needed to feed data about the application’s behavior back into the build phase.

Consequently, development teams could then provide rapid fixes, alterations and improvements, closing the loop within the DevOps toolchain, and allowing the production environment to operate as intended.

The RevDeBug team has personally assisted with the implementation of the platform within Rossmann’s systems. After setting it up, errors were quickly identified and assigned to developers for fixing. Implementing RevDeBug has greatly reduced the time spent on communication between developers and testers, making the entire process of fixing errors significantly faster.

As a result, the testing time for some systems has been cut by 50%.

Thanks to RevDeBug, it has been easier than ever for Rossmann to increase observability. The solution has been used to support the supply chain processes across Poland as well as implemented in an additional desktop application.

“IT systems support is a key matter for Rossmann. The IT department’s role is to support the processes and monitor them when something goes wrong. RevDeBug gives us an opportunity to handle it the best way possible.”

– Piotr Jugiel, Head of the IT Business Systems Development Department at Rossmann