Business opportunity

Delighting customers with a personalized, omnichannel shopping experience is the business vision that Carrefour, the French retail giant, is pursuing with their ongoing cloud-first technology transformation.

However, to satisfy customers in the future, it is necessary to constantly keep them in the present. Customers expect personalized promotions for their favorite products as well as their availability in stores. Carrefour is embracing a strategy of continuous transformation to ensure customers have the best products at the best prices while benefitting from innovation that is improving experiences across physical and digital channels. Satisfying those basic expectations requires continuously improving existing systems and operations to run with the highest efficiency and availability.

While disappointing customers is the most impactful result of delay, Carrefour can also incur large financial penalties from suppliers, shippers, and store owners when just-in-time deliveries are significantly disrupted.


 

Technical challenge

Carrefour had to address three related challenges in their parallel efforts to increase efficiency, reduce the possibility of delay, and innovate customer shopping experiences.

First, existing systems in the Kyndryl data center were running supply operations across 80 warehouses and 3500 stores. High priority incidents in the data center were infrequent. However, Carrefour was aware that any such incident could bring operations to a standstill until resolved. It was a risk they wanted to proactively reduce.

Second, because the IT organization was vertically aligned by technical specialty, troubleshooting efforts were done serially from one team to another, potentially increasing the time to resolve an incident. So, they moved to a horizontal organization per product category for end-to-end operations across the entire product value chain.

Third, though key supply chain applications on Kyndryl mainframe performed reliably, the Carrefour team needed outside expertise to transform those applications and unlock their data for customer-related innovations such as real-time pricing offers.

 

What progress looks like

As a result of the new delivery model, and through steady automation, Carrefour has reduced high impact incidents by 90% since 2023.

As part of embedding team members within the new delivery model, Kyndryl has set up Competence Center to train engineers across the range of functions within Carrefour IT programs. Through the versatility that team members gain, Carrefour increases its capacity to flex resources into strategic priorities, accelerating delivery of new value to customers.

Through high NPS scores and project-related surveys, Carrefour team members consistently express satisfaction with how the Kyndryl partnership is helping them drive business results.