International Supermarket
Case Study

Industry: Food & Retail 
How we helped: Assessment, Leadership, Capability and Delivery Teams

Key Takeaways

Improved and increased use of loyalty scheme by customers

Scalable cloud-based, pricing APIs were made accessible, enabling global scaling 

Ability to decommission mainframe systems

About The Company

Created in the early years of the 20th Century, this company employs over 420,000 people across its HQ in London and 7,000 stores in 11 countries. This supermarket has been consistently recognised as the largest supermarket chain in the UK over the years, holding around 27% of the market.

Since the 1960s, this supermarket has diversified into areas such as the retailing of books, clothing, electronics, furniture, toys, petrol, software, financial services, telecoms and internet services.

Following a multi-billion £ takeover of a wholesaler in 2018, this supermarket announced a 28% rise in operating profits, making a pretax profit before exceptional items of £1.64bn in the year to February 2019 as total group sales rose 2.8% to £57.5bn.

“The partnership between us and 101 Ways on this important programme was great. 101Ways’ digital transformation experience enabled us to improve our ways of working and
scale rapidly; delivering real value to our customers.” 


Head of Product

The Challenge

This supermarket had a complex technology landscape including heritage systems and more modern cloud-native architectures.

With strong product and technology organisations, they were leading the way in building market-leading digital products to support new channels and geographies, whilst reducing technical debt and the cost of technology change.

“To help maintain store profitability, reduce the cost of change, and support new channels, they needed a way of flexing its teams with advanced practitioners in both product and engineering fields,” explained Emma Hopkinson-Spark, Director, 101 Ways. 101 Ways’ support was required to help build and scale strategic APIs that would enable the supermarket to decommission legacy systems.

The Solution

101 Ways provided highly experienced hand-picked consultants into the supermarket’s existing contact, identity, profile and pricing teams at locations in and outside of London.

Pairing with team members to build features and drive outcomes, 101 Ways’ consultants helped embed quality into the teams’ software development practices from story to production. “By refactoring away from larger legacy services towards smarter, cloud-based services, 101 Ways helping the company build more consumable services across its technology estate,” added Hopkinson-Spark.

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