Command Performance: Seeking and Solving with Munvo Companion

Chris and his team are also responsible for the smooth operation of Air Miles’ analytics, scoping and all the little bits of filtering in all their campaigns, which requires a great deal of repeat behavior. To keep the complex processes as transparent as possible, Chris uses a comprehensive master flowchart to create a slew of “starting universes” for all those campaigns – one for their partners in the gas business, one for liquor partners, one for collectors showing interest in the Air Miles website, and so on.

“Our master flowchart runs and defines a huge number of universes,” Chris explains. “By running it in IBM Campaign, we can generate strategic segment returns in seconds instead of minutes. Every minute is valuable in our line of work.”

The master flowchart, created in IBM Campaign, contains hundreds of process boxes. Early each work day, it needs to run before the start of business, so Chris’ team can start working on up-to-date universes as soon as they arrive. Recently, however, they experienced a nerve-wracking slow down:

“Our master flowchart usually runs from 7 to 9 am,” he says. “Then, all of a sudden, it was taking until 11 am to finish. My team couldn’t get to work on the campaign. It was an absolute nightmare situation. When we have 40 highly targeted campaigns with all kinds of segmentation that are delayed like that, we’re letting our collectors and our partners down.”

Wondering what the problem was, Chris bypassed the overwhelming and deeply complex logs produced by IBM Campaign, using Munvo Companion to view historical runtimes, individual process box runtime and further details that enabled him to pinpoint what was causing the slowdown, fix the problem and get his team back to work:

“We would never have been able to find out what was wrong without Companion,” says Chris, matter-of-factly. “Companion enabled us to gain insight in areas we hadn’t thought about before.”