INDUSTRY
Retail
Omnichannel CX and Intelligent Innovation – The Future of Retail
HIGHLIGHTS
- Belk achieved a 15% reduction in operating expenses, 40% lower manual monitoring costs, and proactive management of 58% of incidents through AI-powered operations backed by AI-driven innovation.
- They gained these benefits through ignio™ AIOps, which automated over 290 use cases, enabling real-time transaction monitoring, and deployment of predictive machine learning models.
- With TCS Digitate ignio, one of the most advanced AIOps platforms available, Belk has gained a strategic edge over competitors in the retail space.
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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.
Transforming IT ops
To drive operational excellence and support seamless store experiences, Belk set out to modernize their IT operations with a focus on efficiency, cost optimization, and intelligent automation.
The vision was to become more perceptive by transitioning from reactive, manual processes to a proactive, artificial intelligence (AI)-driven model powered by real-time data analytics. Belk aimed to:
- Enhance visibility across store, e-commerce, and supply chain systems to reduce dependence on manual monitoring
- Deploy real-time transaction monitoring to detect anomalies early and enable faster, data-informed decisions
- Reduce incident volume and operational noise to ensure uninterrupted business continuity
- Introduce automation and self-healing capabilities to minimize manual intervention and accelerate issue resolution
- Build a scalable IT infrastructure and operations model with the flexibility to support Belk’s evolving business needs and future growth
This transformation was key to enabling a resilient, intelligent, and growth-ready IT operations framework.
Belk secures AI edge for operations with TCS ignio™ AIOps
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.
The ignio edge
AI has rapidly reshaped the business landscape, unlocking new possibilities for innovation and operational excellence in retail.
With its early adoption of TCS Digitate ignio, one of the most advanced AIOps platforms available, Belk has gained a strategic edge over competitors in the retail space. This foundation of AI-driven automation and real-time insights has ensured perceptiveness and positioned Belk to further elevate customer experiences, streamline operations, and drive sustainable growth.
Looking ahead, as AI technologies continue to evolve, Belk is well-equipped to scale its capabilities. TCS’s deep domain expertise and commitment to innovation will empower Belk to stay ahead of industry challenges, embrace emerging technologies, and maintain operational agility in a dynamic retail environment.
Anil Sawhney
VP of IT Operations, Belk
The Belk-TCS partnership began a decade back with an infrastructure support project and was quickly followed by a major legacy transformation project, which involved the successful elimination of the entire mainframe environment and led to about $8 million in savings for Belk. The rest is history. Additionally, TCS played a key role working alongside the Belk teams to help us recover from the CrowdStrike incident last year underlining our strong partnership."
PC Thomas
Vice President and Business Unit Head – Retail, Americas, TCS
In the last two years, we have seen AI moving from exuberance to scale. However, we believe Belk has a leg up over everybody else because they have already adopted one of the best AIops product from the market–Ignio.”
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