Case Study
UST helped American grocery store chain boost revenue by 200% through a 17+ year partnership
OUR CLIENT
Founded more than a century ago, this privately held American grocery retailer operates approximately 425 locations, generates nearly $40 billion in annual revenue, and donates millions of dollars each year to the communities it serves.
THE CHALLENGE
Application production support for 145 systems
In 2006, the company needed a technology partner to help manage approximately 140 production applications. The vendor required 24x7 support for incident and problem management, service requests, and system monitoring.
THE TRANSFORMATION
Initial application support project led to a long-running 17+ years of partnership
UST implemented an offshore development center (ODC) model with 55 tech experts working around the clock to help the retailer manage its 145 production applications. The success of that initial project in 2006 kicked off a 17-year (and counting) engagement that now encompasses more than 250 UST associates operating in the U.S. and OCDs in India and the Philippines, supporting 245 applications across more than 40 technology disciplines.
Today, the engagements include:
- Application production support—From that original project, UST now manages approximately 118,000 tickets per year and consistently achieves SLA ratings of 99.976%.
- Point of sale system (POS) support—UST helps the busy grocery store chain maintain systems at its 425+ stores, with nearly 14,000 POS check-out lanes transacting approximately 15,200 sales per day, totaling more than $92.5 million in daily sales.
- POS system development—With responsibility for end-to-end development, testing, and deployment, UST helps the company manage and enhance a mobile app and smart kiosk POS systems for approximately 240 grocery store gas stations.
- Infrastructure, database, and security support—Managing approximately 26,000 tickets annually, UST associates provide off-hour, business-as-usual, and ad hoc project support for the company’s core IT and security infrastructure.
- Ground-up custom development—UST has completed 18 projects to date, including design, development, and systems integration support.
- Enhancements—Throughout the 17-year partnership, UST has implemented nearly 5,000 application and infrastructure enhancements with a 99% successful deployment rate and a defect removal efficiency rate of 96%.
Seamless support during Covid-19 pandemic
As pandemic lockdowns swept the globe and consumers shifted en masse to online grocery shopping, UST dedicated resources to ensure the company’s ecommerce website could handle the volume. The team:
- Automated data load management—to ensure the website could handle the massive increase in visitors and transactions, saving approximately 1,100 manual work hours per year
- Ramped up underlying infrastructure—from 40 to 120 servers
- Upgraded and monitored the WordPress engine and database—to handle transaction spikes during peak shopping hours
- Set up a customer contact center—using a Slack channel to provide dedicated L1 customer support
In addition, UST helped the company quickly develop and release mobile apps to facilitate social distancing for:
- Contactless shopping—so customers could scan and bag their own items and validate their purchases at a POS kiosk
- Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) customers—so low-income families could easily use their benefits for contactless, curbside, and home delivery purchases
- Warehouse partners—to streamline delivery transactions while social distancing
Responding to a catastrophic, record-breaking weather event
When a historic weather event hit the company’s core area of operations in 2021, crippling the area for more than a week with lingering impacts for many more weeks, UST immediately shifted the company’s entire U.S. IT support operations to India. The swift action ensured that the company’s impacted employees could focus on their personal safety with peace of mind that IT operations were in good hands, running business as usual.
THE IMPACT
Long-standing partnership facilitates retailer’s soaring growth
Over the course of UST’s 17-year technology partnership, the grocery store chain has:
- Increased revenue by 200%—from $13 to $39 billion
- Enlarged its store footprint by 41%—from approximately 300 to more than 400 stores
- Added 60% more self-checkout lanes—from 40 to more than 2,400
- Increased its application footprint by 70%—from 145 to 245 systems