Botic?rio Group Deploys Advanced User Analytics

One of the more challenging aspects of business and IT is gauging user satisfaction. As a result, user experience management (UEM) software has become a valuable tool in driving performance gains.

One organization that has placed a premium on the UEM concept is the Boticário Group, Brazil’s largest cosmetic company and a leading global fragrance and cosmetics franchise.

In the past, the company struggled to understand the user experience and system performance. Without a monitoring system in place, executives could see the availability of applications, but not their actual performance. This made it difficult to drive improvements for application performance issues, system errors and help desk problem resolution.

“We had a need to pinpoint the problems faced by our users,” explains Nicholas Alexandre Pierri, senior IT consultant for the Boticário Group. “And we had to identify where we needed to improve.”

After consulting with Gartner and reviewing the vendor landscape, the Boticário Group selected a user analytics and experience management solution from Knoa Software. The system, which went live in July 2016, introduced an integrated monitoring framework that uses SAP User Experience Management (SAP UEM) by Knoa to pull data from CA Spectrum and ServiceNow solutions.

This allows business and IT leaders to monitor user performance in key areas—such as finance, HR and logistics—through a single data repository and a single instance of the SAP UEM running in the cloud. In fact, the Boticário Group is now able to collect end-user analytics across the entire SAP software landscape.

“Knoa monitors all actions that are performed in SAP, as well as times, screens and failures,” Pierri explains. “We use this information to identify the behaviors of the SAP transactions. When a behavioral deviation occurs, we immediately launch an investigation.”  

Improvements in Systems Performance

The UEM framework has led to marked improvements in systems and performance, including delivering alerts for essential support incidents. “By mapping slow SAP transactions, we have been able to identify improvement points,” Pierri says. “This has helped us increase business satisfaction and improve IT’s image.”

For instance, some transactions that previously took eight seconds now require only 0.800 milliseconds. In addition to using the data to make improvements, IT managers also generate reports for senior-level executives. This makes it easier to “ask for adjustments to services that are performing poorly,” he adds.

The company also relies on the system to support SAP users. It delivers critical insights that streamline problem-solving across different teams, departments and business groups.

“When a user calls to complain about a transaction, the service analyst already has a picture of everything the user has done,” Pierri explains. “This makes the problem easier to diagnose.”

In addition, after the solution went live, the company used it to identify licensed users that weren’t accessing SAP. Within the first month, that led to a direct saving of $70,000.

The Boticário Group also plans to expand the use of the system at service desks and other locations within the enterprise. “User analytics with SAP UEM have provided valuable insight into the performance of our SAP software environment and enabled us to identify unique improvement opportunities,” Pierri reports.