Download PDF
New Relic Helps Paper Culture Redefine How Modern Stationery Is Delivered Performance
Technology Category
- Analytics & Modeling - Real Time Analytics
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - API Integration & Management
Applicable Industries
- E-Commerce
- Retail
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
- Sales & Marketing
Use Cases
- Real-Time Location System (RTLS)
- Supply Chain Visibility
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- System Integration
The Challenge
Paper Culture, an eco-friendly stationery company, was facing challenges in maintaining 100% uptime and fast performance for its customers and search engines. The company often experienced seasonal spikes in traffic due to promotional email blasts, which could go viral and create a lot of additional traffic. This, coupled with customers uploading a wide range of complex image files, resulted in peak processing loads. As their business grew, Paper Culture was motivated to continually improve performance. The team had adopted an agile development strategy, often deploying daily enhancements, frequently on demand. It was critical for the technical team to understand the impact of every change on site performance. In the past, Paper Culture often learned about slow performance or other issues from their customers. When Paper Culture received one of these reports, they had to dive into logs for hours, going through thousands of lines of code and piecing a chain of events together to understand and resolve the issue. The technical team knew they needed better insight and control over the development and deployment environments if they wanted to achieve their goal of 100% customer satisfaction.
About The Customer
Paper Culture is an eco-friendly company that enhances its customers’ life events by creating fun, personalized stationery and wall art for specific occasions such as a new baby, baby showers, holidays or any other event that may call for special stationery or a lasting visual memory piece. The company uses fast-growing bamboo for its wall art and every card the company prints is on 100% post-consumer recycled paper. Furthering their commitment to the environment, Paper Culture plants a tree in a U.S. national forest for every order the firm receives. In just three years, Paper Culture has planted over 200,000 trees. The company has created lots of buzz with its bold, eco-friendly, approach to creating highly personalized paper products and bamboo wall art with mentions in the Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, Real Simple, and People — just to name a few. The self-proclaimed “stationery fanatics” attract customers to their e-commerce site with modern designs, premium paper quality, and a free mail and message service. Committed to 24x7 availability and 100% customer satisfaction, Paper Culture’s customers can create limitless designs while having the ability to individualize each card ordered with a printed personal note.
The Solution
The Paper Culture technical team discovered New Relic, a SaaS offering that would require no additional hardware, software, or technical staff. The first thing the team noticed was that implementation was simple and fast. New Relic monitors the entire end-to-end experience from the discovery on Facebook, to the personalization and checkout process on the Paper Culture site and finally to the tree dedication that can take them back through the social media channels. The team starts its work with the New Relic Dashboard which gives them a high level view of the app and aggregates details that show possible bottlenecks. This ability to see cause and effect is invaluable in isolating and resolving performance problems. The Paper Culture team particularly likes the transaction breakdown presented by New Relic’s Real User Monitoring (RUM). RUM provides a cohesive picture of the entire request from back-end to the front-end and helps them validate their assumptions and builds confidence for the team. The team has insight into every aspect including cloud storage, partner APIs, the customer’s browser, the application server and the database. Another critical success factor for the company is their selection of Joyent for their cloud-based hosting platform. The performance, scalability, reliability and security inherent in Joyent’s cloud computing solution enables Paper Culture to handle seasonal loads and deliver the close to 100% availability needed for those smooth transactions, every time in every season.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
Related Case Studies.
Case Study
Improving Production Line Efficiency with Ethernet Micro RTU Controller
Moxa was asked to provide a connectivity solution for one of the world's leading cosmetics companies. This multinational corporation, with retail presence in 130 countries, 23 global braches, and over 66,000 employees, sought to improve the efficiency of their production process by migrating from manual monitoring to an automatic productivity monitoring system. The production line was being monitored by ABB Real-TPI, a factory information system that offers data collection and analysis to improve plant efficiency. Due to software limitations, the customer needed an OPC server and a corresponding I/O solution to collect data from additional sensor devices for the Real-TPI system. The goal is to enable the factory information system to more thoroughly collect data from every corner of the production line. This will improve its ability to measure Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) and translate into increased production efficiencies. System Requirements • Instant status updates while still consuming minimal bandwidth to relieve strain on limited factory networks • Interoperable with ABB Real-TPI • Small form factor appropriate for deployment where space is scarce • Remote software management and configuration to simplify operations
Case Study
How Sirqul’s IoT Platform is Crafting Carrefour’s New In-Store Experiences
Carrefour Taiwan’s goal is to be completely digital by end of 2018. Out-dated manual methods for analysis and assumptions limited Carrefour’s ability to change the customer experience and were void of real-time decision-making capabilities. Rather than relying solely on sales data, assumptions, and disparate systems, Carrefour Taiwan’s CEO led an initiative to find a connected IoT solution that could give the team the ability to make real-time changes and more informed decisions. Prior to implementing, Carrefour struggled to address their conversion rates and did not have the proper insights into the customer decision-making process nor how to make an immediate impact without losing customer confidence.
Case Study
Digital Retail Security Solutions
Sennco wanted to help its retail customers increase sales and profits by developing an innovative alarm system as opposed to conventional connected alarms that are permanently tethered to display products. These traditional security systems were cumbersome and intrusive to the customer shopping experience. Additionally, they provided no useful data or analytics.
Case Study
Ensures Cold Milk in Your Supermarket
As of 2014, AK-Centralen has over 1,500 Danish supermarkets equipped, and utilizes 16 operators, and is open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. AK-Centralen needed the ability to monitor the cooling alarms from around the country, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Each and every time the door to a milk cooler or a freezer does not close properly, an alarm goes off on a computer screen in a control building in southwestern Odense. This type of alarm will go off approximately 140,000 times per year, equating to roughly 400 alarms in a 24-hour period. Should an alarm go off, then there is only a limited amount of time to act before dairy products or frozen pizza must be disposed of, and this type of waste can quickly start to cost a supermarket a great deal of money.
Case Study
Supermarket Energy Savings
The client had previously deployed a one-meter-per-store monitoring program. Given the manner in which energy consumption changes with external temperature, hour of the day, day of week and month of year, a single meter solution lacked the ability to detect the difference between a true problem and a changing store environment. Most importantly, a single meter solution could never identify root cause of energy consumption changes. This approach never reduced the number of truck-rolls or man-hours required to find and resolve issues.
