Mission Statement

In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic forced many retailers to rapidly adapt to changing consumer behaviour and operational challenges. Aldi UK faced the urgent need to launch an online Click & Collect service to accommodate customers who were increasingly shopping online due to safety concerns. The project was critical and complex: Aldi required this shopping service to be live across 30 UK stores within a tight 12-week timeline. The new platform was not integrated with any existing Aldi systems, creating significant operational challenges. 

Tools Used

  • Alteryx

  • SQL

Impact

Jump-starting Aldi from a traditional grocer to an e-Commerce leader. Vastly reduced manual labour and reduced manual errors as follows:

  • Automated 15+ FTE across logistics, corporate buying, IT, finance & admin, store ops.

  • £ millions in cost reductions

  • Improved reactivity to discover & resolve unknown situations.

  • Data Driven quality and confidence improvements.

 

Detailed Solution

Aldi used Orckestra as their e-Commerce platform. This used Azure Blob Storage as the staging location for inbound and outbound data. Much of the Alteryx work involved taking information from Aldi databases, formatting it for Orckestra and loading it into Azure Blob Storage. This process had to run every night and ensure that price shifts in Aldi stores were replicated to the online platform.

Aldi also required reporting on the use of their online platform and the performance of their picking staff. A vast amount of data from the UK Aldi stores had to be collated and reported with very quick turnaround, with Aldi targeting near real-time reporting. This was achieved by setting up SQL scripts to create materialised views. [A materialised view is a standard database View report that is converted into an actual table]. Once the SQL stage had done the heavy lifting, Alteryx could download the data, filter and summarise it, and then prepare files for a Tableau dashboard. This meant that there was a lag of only a few hours between picking/delivery events and being able to report to senior management on KPI's for those events.

Deliveroo price updates; Aldi was using Deliveroo as a stop-gap for electronic orders.  They had a large team of clerical staff manually updating prices via the Deliveroo web front end.  With workflows, Aldi were able to convert this to an API process where Alteryx took a spreadsheet of data (SKU's and their prices) and uploaded them automatically.  This drastically reduced the manual labour and manual error involved in the process.

In summary, we had to:

  • Connect Aldi’s legacy dashboards to a new e-Commerce system.

  • Report on e-Commerce picking & delivery in near real-time to a Tableau dashboard.

  • Automate the pricing changes for Deliveroo.

The service has expanded to 250 UK & Ireland stores, driven by the scalable and self-managed platform Continuum helped establish. 

Conclusion

Continuum’s expertise in Alteryx was instrumental in helping Aldi rapidly deploy a new Click & Collect service during a critical time.

The success of this project contributed to Aldi receiving the Alteryx 2020 Excellence Award in the "Accelerator - Best Scalability/Integration" category.

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