Evolving market trends in Grocery Retail are both challenging and creating opportunities for Ahold Delhaize USA, and it is responding with bold strategies and an increased focus on large-scale business transformation to modernize its Technology, Data and Business systems to be successful in this increasingly complex marketplace.
For Ahold Delhaize USA, it was imperative to consolidate and modernize disparate IT systems as part of a large-scale business transformation.
Ahold Delhaize USA owns and runs more than 2,200 grocery stores and has a rapidly growing online grocery business. A unit of Dutch-based retail leader Ahold Delhaize, Ahold Delhaize USA operates well-known brands such as Food Lion, Hannaford, FreshDirect, Stop & Shop, Giant Food and Giant Martin’s. The company looked at insourcing its fresh procurement, rapidly modernizing and building new distribution centers, and better managing and building a more demand-driven store inventory system to keep products on shelves. This included applying data and analytics to know what items loyal customers want and stay ahead of the demand.
Putting the underlying technology and infrastructure in place to support its business goals meant that Ahold Delhaize USA needed to consolidate and modernize its legacy systems. To deliver on a commitment to provide convenience and affordability to its customers, the company embarked on a large-scale business and IT partner consolidation and transformation.
As IT partner for Ahold Delhaize USA’s transformation journey, DXC Technology is delivering a broad range of services across the IT estate. DXC has provided infrastructure services for the company for 16 years and as part of the transformation. These services include:
- Cloud and Infrastructure Services
- Application Modernization
- Implementation of Data and Advanced Analytics Services
- Supply chain optimization initiatives
- Workplace Modernization (“work as you live” initiatives)
- HR and Payroll systems consolidation and modernization
- Digital Asset Management
This first phase of the transformation focused on creating value and convenience for Ahold Delhaize USA’s customers. DXC has been moving much of the company’s IT activities, such as application support, to a managed services model and has made significant technology investments. To drive service modernization, DXC established a Digital Command Center to manage various aspects of the project.
To meet its goal to serve customers when, where and how they want through multiple channels, the retailer has ramped up its ability to offer customers a fully integrated omnichannel experience. As part of this, DXC is partnering with Peapod Digital Labs to help drive growth in Ahold Delhaize USA’s online grocery business.
The transformation also includes modernizing Ahold Delhaize USA’s supply chains, moving to an in-house self-distribution model for fresh procurement. This will enable Ahold Delhaize USA to fulfill its ambition to create healthy and sustainable offerings for its customers.
Learn more about DXC services
Analytics and Engineering
Applications
Cloud
IT Outsourcing
Security
Move to cloud the right way
Central to the transformation are plans to migrate applications from the data center to the Microsoft Azure cloud, following DXC’s Cloud RightTM approach. DXC is helping Ahold Delhaize USA operate in a hybrid environment, making the right technology investments at the right time and on the right platform.
DXC is helping the company use Azure virtual machines to modernize its IT environment and support a successful migration without incurring hardware procurement and maintenance costs. DXC employed a DevSecOps team that has helped build the underlying container and pipeline infrastructure to accelerate application modernization.
Value delivered
Improving the shopping experience with analytics
Addressing an essential need for retailers, DXC is enabling Ahold Delhaize USA to improve its business analytics capabilities. Previously, data was scattered and not optimized for business purposes. DXC led the development of the company’s enterprise analytics initiative, including helping build and manage an Azure Data Lake, with a focus on providing access to high-quality data to Ahold Delhaize USA business users in a secure manner.
DXC’s analytics and engineering professionals played a key role in helping Ahold Delhaize USA enhance its source data so it could be used more effectively for making business decisions. Automation was used to convert legacy workloads to the Azure platform, so that sustainable Azure analytical workloads could be incorporated into day-to-day operations from the start.
Quality service metrics and a quality dashboard were introduced, with a focus on outcome-driven analytics. This approach dramatically increased the adoption of analytics. DXC’s enterprise analytics platform includes data literacy suites to increase self-service capabilities and foster “citizen development” by Ahold Delhaize USA associates to accelerate the use of analytics throughout the organization. Behind the scenes, DXC will be providing AgileOps support with swarming support teams under a flexible capacity model.
Building a solid foundation for transformation has been key. Helping Ahold Delhaize USA develop a common operating model included a tool rationalization initiative and creating flexible consumption-based services. DXC helped establish business requirements, and then working prototypes were rolled out to help the retailer feel confident the transformation was on the right track. The effort also included changes such as automating data integrations to the Microsoft Power BI platform to improve enterprise business intelligence.
Embracing ‘work as you live’
Another goal of the project was to improve Ahold Delhaize USA’s workplace and mobility capabilities to give employees — and ultimately customers — a better user experience. Implementing Modern Workplace services, DXC introduced self-service capabilities that are making it easier and more convenient for Ahold Delhaize USA workers to quickly address IT issues.
DXC increased the number of walk-in workplace services centers from two to six and introduced virtual kiosks to augment a revamped service desk.
Overall, DXC has been proactive in bringing technology innovation to Ahold Delhaize USA, while increasing the flexibility and the consistency of IT services to meet the challenges of the retail industry.
