The cloud helps Jumbo process growing demand for online orders

Food retailer Jumbo wanted to find a scalable solution to keep up with growing demand for online orders. It also wanted to accelerate innovation, allowing it to flexibly accommodate customers’ needs and wishes. “We want to meet our customers where they are – be it in the shops or online.”

Jumbo, the Dutch supermarket chain, is committed to offering its customers a seamless shopping experience. Years ago the food retailer had already designed and built an online platform with the ambition to process several thousands of orders per week. But demand has since grown to a similar number of orders per day, with a giant peak during the Christmas season. “Year after year, we saw more and more people using our app, and at some point the infrastructure we had in place simply couldn’t facilitate that anymore,” says Tim Hehenkamp, Jumbo’s Executive Director Technology & Data.

Scalability and cost-efficiency

As a result, Jumbo’s platform needed to be optimized to enable peak-demand order processing. They sat down to discuss their options with their IT partner, Schuberg Philis, and ended up selecting the public cloud at AWS. Hehenkamp explains, “The cloud offered us infrastructural possibilities like massive scalability and cost-efficiency, as we no longer needed to run our own hardware in Schuberg Philis’s datacenter. But it also offered us the opportunity to make better analytic use of the data available to us.”

Technology, processes, and people

We advised Jumbo to move the platform and the entire environment for application and services from the on-premises data center to the public cloud, which gave the supermarket chain a secure, resilient environment that met the company’s requirements for scalability and reliability. Schuberg Philis led the entire cloud migration process, and Jumbo was responsible for the necessary application upgrades. “We didn’t only migrate the technology into the cloud,” says Anuschka Diderich, Customer Director at Schuberg Philis. “We also included Jumbo’s processes and people. You can fully capitalize on the added value of the public cloud if you make sure that people can use all of its capacities.” For a number of years now, Jumbo has been making considerable investments in using data to better understand its customers’ needs. “In everything we do, our focus is on the customer,” says Hehenkamp. One example of this is that Jumbo assesses the value of every product for both customers and the company itself. “We then use this customer-product metric to improve the selection of items we offer.”

For you, with you, by you

Schuberg Philis’s approach is a good match for Jumbo, says Diderich: “For you, with you, by you.” Gosse Reinsma is manager of the Jumbo Tech Campus (JTC). “This unit handles all of the company’s digital developments,” he explains. “The JTC bring together around 400 people, working in about 50 teams. Digitization is so important to Jumbo that we want to take on more of this work ourselves and attract the right talented people to do it.” In practice, this meant that Schuberg Philis passed on more and more of the development side of the platform to Jumbo. And by now, operational management is also increasingly being shifted to so-called DevOps teams at Jumbo. “That’s what I like about our collaboration with Jumbo,” says Hehenkamp. “They show us what the technology can do, but they also give us room to operate independently. It’s good to have a partner that enables you to actively pursue this transition.”

DevOps offers energy and creativity

The DevOps approach works well for the teams within the JTC. Diderich explains: “At Schuberg Philis, we have a dedicated team of people for each client. The team that builds the solution is also responsible for its execution. Not only for managing it, but also for our 24/7 support services.” In this way, developers can quickly build small components, so-called microservices, which lets them experiment with new technologies or services, says Reinsma. “It enables us to stay on top of developments in the market.” That speed is one of the benefits of DevOps, but as the work is performed in mixed teams, the quality of the delivered solutions is higher. Also, this way of working makes Jumbo a more attractive employer for scarce IT talent, according to both Reinsma and Diderich. “Working together generates both energy and creativity,” says the latter. What’s more, it offers Jumbo the opportunity to quickly use the data collected to implement new services or solutions for its customers – wherever they may be. “We follow the customer,” says Hehenkamp. One such new service is the fully automated and personalized “Did you forget something?” product list that customers see just before completing an order. “This automated, personalized feature has tripled our conversion.”

A baptism of fire during the lockdown

Jumbo’s new cloud platform was shown to meet its requirements for security, availability, and scalability during peak periods. But the real test came in the spring of 2020, when the world suddenly went into lockdown and unheard-of numbers of people in the Netherlands started ordering their groceries online. “Our normal peak period is around Christmas and we spend months preparing for it,” says Hehenkamp. “But the lockdown presented us, with zero preparation, with a peak that was many times larger than the seasonal Christmas rush. It was a baptism of fire for our new technical capabilities, which proved more than capable of handling the dramatic increase in traffic. In retrospect, we had deployed the changes to our landscape just in time.”

Innovating fast

The AWS cloud offers many benefits. The new platform makes it possible to implement new applications faster than ever. In the past, for example, it took a lot of time to ramp up server capacity – something that can now be achieved within a day. And the 100% uptime, fast website, and mobile app all help to guarantee a streamlined customer experience. What’s more, based on analysis of the available data, Jumbo can further personalize offers to individual customers, reward them for their patronage, and offer smart payment solutions – all of which placed customers at the heart of Jumbo’s service proposition. Which is exactly what the company hoped to achieve. Reinsma adds: “The speed of innovation also matters to us. From a market perspective, of course, but also to attract and retain talented employees.”

Going for a good night’s sleep

Schuberg Philis guarantees 100% uptime for its systems. Chief Marketing Officer Ivo Roefs explains: “With this way of working, we can promise our customers a good night’s sleep, every night. And that matters, because we work on systems that are so business-critical to our customers that if anything were to go wrong, they would want to get a call – even in the middle of the night. But broken nights drain your energy, which affects your creativity and therefore your power to innovate. That’s why that uptime is so important to us. We want our customers to sleep well while we take care of the availability of their systems.” Hehenkamp and Reinsma smile: that’s a promise that really makes a difference.

“Because of the speed and depth with which we develop our landscape, incidents are bound to happen every now and then. But because we have an agile way of working and make more frequent, smaller adjustments instead of a few large ones, the number of issues has decreased considerably and we are better able to handle the hiccups that do occur,” says Reinsma. “But it’s a good motto, as it exemplifies Schuberg Philis’s commitment to delivering quality.”

Source: FD