Accelerating Performance for Pilot Travel Centers
Application
Description
- Corporate Portal for Pilot’s Network of Travel Centers
Business Needs
- Faster portal performance
- Ability to quickly diagnose performance problems
- Ability to monitor system performance
CLIENT BACKGROUND
With over 280 travel centers in 40 states, Pilot Travel Centers LLC is the United States’ largest operator of travel centers and largest seller of over-the-road diesel fuel. Each travel center includes one or more nationally known chain restaurants, a retail store, and travel services for interstate travelers and professional drivers. Based in Knoxville, Tennessee, this privately held company employs approximately 14,000 people nationwide and had revenues of $10.1 billion in 2005.
BUSINESS PROBLEM
Pilot Travel Centers needed to improve the performance of The Hub—its corporate portal that provides vital information for its travel center managers. Along with company news, checklists, surveys, HR-related forms, and links to other systems like order entry and Web-based training, The Hub sends out key sales metrics, such as year-over-year sales comparisons and daily flash reports, so that travel center managers can be in tune with sales. Logging into the portal was taking anywhere from 30 seconds to 5 minutes, and these long login response times resulting from system degradation were putting use of the portal in jeopardy.
SOLUTION
The Hub, built with IBM WebSphere Portal, connects to an Oracle database as well as other third party software for supply chain management, help desk functions and OLAP reporting. When Pilot needed help diagnosing the portal problems, IBM recommended Prolifics—an IBM Business Partner with extensive IBM WebSphere Portal expertise. Prolifics’ expert consultants were able to help Pilot personnel fix some of the performance issues and implement portal best practices for design and configuration.
In addition, Prolifics recommended a complementary software package, IBM Tivoli Composite Application Manager (ITCAM) for WebSphere, that specifically helps diagnose bottlenecks in WebSphere installations.
Pilot Travel Centers could see how a tool such as ITCAM could help keep their systems running smoothly. Since diagnosing issues through trial and error could take anywhere from 2 days to 2 weeks, they wanted to be proactive in monitoring system performance. ITCAM has a small enough footprint so that it can run on a production system, allowing you to see the response times of portlets, data sources and server throughput. With the performance metrics that ITCAM provides, system administrators can spot decreasing performance trends before reports come in from end users, and with its ability to deep dive into running J2EE and Portal applications, they can quickly discover and repair the root cause of these bottlenecks.
With the improvements in performance, user feedback about the portal improved immediately. With the installation of ITCAM on their production system, Pilot is ready to investigate any future problems, keeping The Hub ready to serve its many users.
“Keeping The Hub up and running is critical to our business. We want to be proactive both in monitoring our systems and diagnosing bottlenecks, and ITCAM will help achieve those objectives.”
- Dave DePrimo
Manager of Corporate Systems for Pilot Travel Centers