Food retailer Ahold Delhaize includes supermarkets, convenience stores, online delivery services and specialty stores. Spanning Europe, the United States and Indonesia, the company’s overall business is serving some 50 million retail customers a week, and growing.
Ahold Delhaize’s commitment to make life a “little easier, healthier and affordable” for its shoppers demands digital transformation together with its trusted partners to stay ahead of the curve as customers’ preferred grocery store.
Ahold Delhaize brands include Albert Heijn, Etos, Food Lion, Gall & Gall, Hannaford and Peapod. One of the local Dutch brands, Albert Heijn, required an agile approach to solution delivery, moving away from a manual process for requesting new servers. With the manual process, it usually took several days to deliver a single new server that would be secure and fully compliant with company regulations.
Portal power
To speed things up, DXC Technology proposed, built and implemented a self-service portal for Albert Heijn’s IT department. The portal is powered by DXC Hybrid and Multicloud services for the VMware platform, a key component of DXC’s IT modernisation program. DXC’s platform is a complete cloud solution integrating hardware, software and services into a dedicated enterprise-grade cloud.
From the self-service portal, users can customise and order servers. Similarly, they can easily provision infrastructure and platform services (IaaS and PaaS), scaling them up or down with just a few clicks. Users can also leverage the self-service portal to take snapshots of servers and order data backups and restores. The system is integrated with DXC’s back-end IT systems for monitoring and management.
The portal is powered by DXC Hybrid and Multicloud services for the VMware platform, a key component of DXC’s IT modernisation program.
Faster, lower cost, more secure
The benefits to Albert Heijn have been substantial. The self-service portal provides simple and fast deployment of infrastructure service, allowing server access in just a few hours. Automation eliminates all manual errors. The company also gains greater flexibility, increased availability with next-gen technology, greater adherence to standards and even better regulatory compliance.
Because the new setup is based on a consumption-based pricing model, Albert Heijn will pay only for what it actually uses, so costs can be easily forecast.
Security is a key benefit. Every server is identically configured by applying templates and automation. This also ensures that all servers are delivered in accordance with the policies of Albert Heijn’s security department.
The platform enables the IT department of Albert Heijn to bring innovations to market faster — and it allows the team to spend more time delivering sustainable solutions for its business.