Kmart achieves exceptional uptime with New Relic

Kmart, a beloved Australian retailer with over 50 years of history, is committed to providing an affordable lifestyle to its customers. With a vast network of over 300 stores and a workforce of 44,000 across Australia and New Zealand, Kmart is dedicated to strengthening its market-leading omnichannel experience and deepening customer engagement through ongoing investments in its digital business.

In 2020, Kmart embarked on a comprehensive re-platforming process to support its digital evolution. Recognizing the need for peak performance across online and in-store point of sale (POS) systems, Kmart sought to improve system resilience and enhance the overall customer experience. A critical aspect of this transformation was gaining reliable data on website access and customer purchase journeys, from entry to checkout.

To achieve its objectives, Kmart partnered with New Relic and rolled out its all-in-one observability platform. By leveraging New Relic's application performance monitoring, browser monitoring, and synthetics monitoring, Kmart gained proactive insights into its application environment and customer experience. The integration with Slack facilitated seamless collaboration and faster issue resolution across teams. Dashboards provided Kmart with the ability to track user behavior and stock movement, enabling proactive identification of issues and emerging trends.

Kmart's implementation of New Relic has yielded impressive results, including 99.9% uptime over the past six months, a mean time to detect (MTTD) of 17 minutes, and a mean time to resolve (MTTR) of under two hours. The solution supports multiple peak online shopping events, such as Black Friday, Easter, and Christmas. Furthermore, New Relic has democratized data across the organization, fostering a cultural shift and empowering teams to make informed decisions.

Value Results:

• Achieved 99.9% uptime, ensuring seamless customer experiences.

• Reduced MTTD to 17 minutes, enabling rapid issue detection and resolution.

• Increased production deployments to 4.4 times a day, accelerating innovation and feature releases.

• Improved developer productivity, allowing teams to focus on new features and products.

• Democratized data across the organization, fostering a data-driven culture and informed decision-making.