Carrefour Belgium

Sun-based Service-Oriented Architecture Streamlines Processes, Dramatically Reduces IT Costs

Carrefour Belgium is part of the France-based Carrefour group, which is the second leading retailer in the world with more than 15,000 hypermarkets, supermarkets, discount stores, and convenience stores throughout Europe, Latin America, and Asia. Carrefour Belgium operates 650 of those stores and has 19,000 employees.

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Customer Challenges

Integrate disparate applications throughout store network to streamline data flow between stores and headquarters
Ensure quick availability of purchased vendor services for greater customer satisfaction
Provide access to real-time sales data for better inventory management and to sustain and grow competitive advantage
Improve tracking of financial data for auditing compliance
Simplify the complexities of application development and deployment to reduce IT time and costs

Solution

Carrefour Belgium employed a Sun-based open source service-oriented architecture (SOA) to create a seamless, interoperable, and scalable application integration infrastructure. The new infrastructure provided the company with an integrated environment that allowed it to streamline processes and standardize applications throughout its 650 retail stores, making them more agile for new products and markets.

Business Results

Improved speed and consistency of data flow between the stores and headquarters
Faster Implementation of Partner initiatives
Provided real-time visibility of sales information
Simplified application development and deployment
Reduced IT costs by 70 – 80 percent

Products and Services

Story Details

When your company has 650 retail stores generating 700,000 sales transactions a day, you better have an IT infrastructure that can move as fast as your inventory does. For Carrefour Belgium that was a top priority.

Carrefour Belgium — part of the European retail giant the Carrefour group — operates a countrywide retail network ranging from small convenience stores to expanded hypermarkets that offer one-stop shopping convenience for a variety of groceries, merchandise, and services. The company has grown steadily over the years, in 2007, revenues totaled 4.73 billion euros ($6.9 billion).

" Java CAPS and the underlying GlassFish run-time environment give us high performance, stability, high availability, and strong operational management capabilities. "

— Frank Lecroix, Windows & EAI Unit Manager, Carrefour Belgium

Business was brisk, but the company's IT infrastructure lagged. Each store was using different hardware and software to transmit data to headquarters. Sales transactions, daily sales reports, customer information, and other critical business information from each store had to be funneled through separate back-office software applications. This disconnect created several problems for the company.

A major area of concern was customer satisfaction. The retail chain contracts with key vendors, such as iTunes, to sell mobile entertainment services that are in high demand. Those transactions have to be transmitted to the vendors before services can start. The lack of integration, combined with the large volume of data being processed, made a viable implementation nearly impossible.

Additionally, the lack of integration within the store network and with headquarters compromised the company's ability to respond quickly to market needs and stay ahead of the competition. Carrefour Belgium also found it difficult to maintain up-to-date records for financial reporting. What's more, application development (provided by a third-party vendor) was complex due to the disparate systems and therefore costly. Deployment of new applications was also challenging.

The company decided to address its needs by constructing a service-oriented architecture as part of an enterprise application integration, using open source, open standards technology. It chose GlassFish V2 as the foundation and upgraded from the Sun Java Composite Application Platform Suite (Java CAPS) 5.x to Sun Java CAPS 6.0.

GlassFish is based on the technology of Sun Java Platform Enterprise Edition 5 Application Server and its productized counterpart, the Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server. With features like Enterprise Java Beans, GlassFish offers a cost-effective platform for developing and delivering applications that meet the needs of today's enterprise, including next-generation Web applications.

Java CAPS includes core components that provide a strong foundation of application server and identity support for integration products, as well as a portal interface to support user collaboration with composite applications. Together GlassFish and Java CAPS provide a fast and reliable integration environment that proved to be ideal for all of Carrefour Belgium's needs.

Sales transactions now flow directly to the home office for immediate processing, eliminating backlogs and ensuring quick access to purchased services two times faster. In addition, headquarters now receives critical sales information from the stores in minutes instead of days. This gives management real-time visibility that helps the company to adjust quickly to consumer demand generated by its promotions, to sustain and grow its competitive advantage, and to track financial data more efficiently for reporting.

Carrefour Belgium also realized a dramatic 70 – 80 percent reduction in IT costs due to the new architecture. “The single integrated development environment allowed us to regroup all of our Java development in a more rational and efficient way,” explains Frank Lacroix, Windows & EAI Unit Manager at Carrefour Belgium. And, he adds, “By using Java Business Integration features and Java connection architecture, we can easily deploy one application into more than 650 stores.”

Overall, Carrefour Belgium has gained the benefits of quality open standards Sun technology and the ability to scale up without cost or interoperability limitations as it continues to grow.