Auchan France: Leveraging IoT for Enhanced 'Phygital' Retail Experiences

Auchan France is a multi-format and phygital retailer that combines physical and digital food retail formats to offer its customers a fun shopping experience. The company has more than 600 locations and employs over 60,000 people. For over 60 years, Auchan has been committed to providing customers with outstanding shopping experiences, whether they shop in-store or online. The company has a massive data management system to handle data from 500 applications used across the business. Auchan's operations are growing rapidly, with the company currently processing roughly five million data flows daily.

Auchan France, a multi-format and phygital retailer with over 600 locations and 60,000 employees, was facing challenges with its massive data management system. The system was responsible for handling data from 500 applications used across the business. The company was relying on on-premise infrastructure to manage data, but it was struggling with speed, monitoring, and scalability issues due to the rapid growth of its operations. The company was processing approximately five million data flows daily through its database and various applications covering business intelligence, supply chain, financials, B2B, human resources, and more. The platform team at Auchan was seeking ways to maximize the value of the data exchange system and improve access to business intelligence.

Auchan France chose to work with Google Cloud and partner Elastic to support its forward-facing goals. The company identified Elastic to improve data capture and, after a successful test on its on-premise database, decided to move forward with Elastic Observability moving to Elastic Cloud on Google Cloud. This move provided Auchan with a more efficient and effective means of monitoring the flow of data across the company. Google Cloud solutions such as BigQuery provided the processing power behind the new data infrastructure developed by Auchan’s platform team, while Elastic provided the tools to best leverage data by stacking and visualizing it in real-time. Auchan also used Google Kubernetes Engine and Cloud Functions to further optimize data management and analytics and improve performance across its 500 applications.

• The integration of Google Cloud and Elastic Observability has brought significant operational benefits to Auchan France. The company has been able to offload data processing and analytics to these platforms, allowing the Auchan platform team to focus on more strategic matters. The new system has also enabled various business units to observe data in a clean dashboard and choose which information to capture and analyze. Furthermore, the company has developed a new application to monitor the flow of information through its backend systems. The advanced infrastructure, network, and data solutions have improved the customer experience as shoppers move between the company’s physical and digital stores, helping Auchan to stand out from other retailers.

• Reduced overall costs of data storage, processing, and analytics

• Removed infrastructure maintenance demands through managed services

• Improved performance of data exchange platform through more advanced cloud-based services