Company Overview
The Carrefour Group, with 13,000 multi-format stores in 30 countries, is a world leader in providing high-quality food at affordable prices. The Carrefour Argentina division is the country’s top multi-format supermarket chain with more than 590 branches under the Carrefour Market, Express, Maxi, Hiper, and Carrefour.com.ar brands. With a presence in 22 provinces, the company has been part of the daily life of millions of Argentines, delivering a wide range of products and services for almost 40 years.
Carrefour continues to innovate and adapt to new expectations and behaviors around food. To guide people's choices and facilitate access to healthy food, it is reinforcing its omni-channel strategy. While enhancing the online shopping experience, it's also increasing in-store customer engagement by investing in formats that are suitable for the daily lives of city dwellers.
In big cities, that means increasing the density of small and proximity formats that make it easier for customers to get the products they need whenever and wherever they need them. As part of this expansion strategy to bring stores even closer to customers, Carrefour Argentina planned to open 540 express branches within five years.
The Opportunity
To conduct daily business across its branches, each store generates massive data sets, including product prices, replacements, special offers and promotions, product maintenance, sales information, and more. The amount of required data exchanges have increased dramatically with the growth of Express stores. Due to their size, Express stores must communicate frequently with the centralized processing system. For example, since they operate with small stockrooms, stock replenishment cycles need to occur more often to avoid out-of-stock situations. They also require regular updates to price and discount lists, which are typical in the Argentinian market.
Data exchanges between Express branches and the central processing system are vital. Any communication problem contributing to incomplete or delayed data transmissions could affect the availability or prices of products, ultimately leading to losses in revenue, unhappy customers, and reputational damage. To support its business transformation and sustain growth, Carrefour needed to add new technological capabilities to its existing operating model to support the increased number of data exchanges and application workflows generated by the new branches.
The Solution
For more than ten years, Carrefour has used Control-M from BMC to orchestrate data and application workflows across platforms and ensure all its business processes happen in order and on time.
Carrefour’s longtime partner consultancy, CG Consultores SRL, advised the company to implement Control-M Managed File Transfer, which allowed it to support data transfers and processes 11.8 times greater than when it managed 50 branches with the same resource set just five years earlier. Control-M Managed File Transfer can automate and integrate file-based data movements within existing related workflows, ensuring scalability, reliability, maximum visibility, and control.
By maintaining a single, unified view, Control-M Managed File Transfer enabled real-time problem detection of file transfer-related issues and quick remediation, enhancing the quality of data at each store.
With Control-M Managed File Transfer, Carrefour was able to:
- Efficiently manage rapid business growth
- Improve data quality
- Eliminate information exchange problems
- Reduce stock issues
- Enhance communication between stores and the central processing system
“Control-M has truly become a fundamental tool for our business.”
— Daniel Di Paola, Jefe Back Office, Operaciones Gestión de Usuarios