Mercadona: Agile, flexible, and scalable innovation powered by Google Cloud
About Mercadona
Mercadona, a family-owned company, is one of the leading brick-and-mortar and online supermarkets in Spain. Founded in 1977, it currently has 1,628 stores throughout Spain, 41 in Portugal, and a workforce of 99,000 people. All of this enables Mercadona to help more than 5.7 million households satisfy their grocery, personal care, and pet care needs.
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Contact usAs part of its digital transformation, Spain's leading supermarket chain has adopted Google Cloud to develop cloud-based applications.
Google Cloud results
- Deploying the necessary infrastructure for any application in just 15 minutes
- Today, applications can respond in high-demand periods thanks to Google Kubernetes Engine
- Creating Activo2, an employee portal that smoothly processes up to 20,000 requests per minute
- Monitoring and optimizing 70% of resources at the click of a button and with automation
- Talent retention: the Mercadona IT team has tripled in five years
The cloud as a basis for profound, total modernization
Mercadona is well aware of the challenges that growth brings. Founded in 1977 as a family company, today it is Spain's leading supermarket chain. With 1,630 stores throughout Spain, 41 in Portugal, and a workforce of 99,000 people focused on excellence, the need for a technological and cultural transformation that would enable it to keep bringing the best products to millions of Spanish and Portuguese families has become clear in recent years.
This digital transformation process has also become one of the company's management priorities, underpinned by one clear idea: technology alone is not enough. Mercadona believes that it's essential to invest in projects that provide value to the "bosses" (as Mercadona calls its customers). To this end, the company proposed modernizing and digitizing its processes, relying on internally developed solutions using modern programming languages and infrastructure that ensure maximum flexibility, availability, and agility.
A promising step toward building a cloud-based infrastructure for Mercadona was the creation of Mercadona Online. This is the company's e-commerce platform, which it used to take sales from the shelves to the web, focusing on an improved user experience.
Striving for autonomy and cloud efficiency
Although it's easy to think only about the company's physical stores, the complex network of technology, data, and connectivity that sustains them is equally important. One day at Mercadona involves 170,000 purchase transactions, the management of 46,000 orders, 2,500 devices operating in its logistics centers, and 17,000 in-store mobile devices and terminals, and that's without even taking into account the company's offices. In total, some 6 million processes are carried out every day.
One of the main challenges Mercadona faced in its data centers came when launching a new application. When sizing this infrastructure based on the peak use of an application, the infrastructure was idle for 90% of the time.
The solution to this common problem was in the cloud.
One of the cloud's main advantages is that it makes resource management streamlined, fast, and reliable. Allocating more resources where they are needed can be automated or done with the click of a button. At the same time, these resources (and the resulting costs) can be optimized based on the company's needs: more resources for high demand periods, and fewer when demand drops. This was exactly what Mercadona was looking for: agility and autonomy. And what better way of starting its cloud journey than with Google Cloud?
With Google Cloud on board, Mercadona embarked on the first project in its paradigm shift toward a cloud-native architecture: Activo2.
"Google Cloud hasn't just offered us a robust, flexible infrastructure. We've also relied on all Google's experience to achieve autonomous public cloud management and leverage all the innovation Google provides."
—Juanjo López, Director of Systems and Communications at Mercadona ITCloud-native architecture for employee management
Managing a workforce of almost 100,000 employees is a complex task, especially without a streamlined technological infrastructure. An apparently trivial issue like checking payroll, for example, involves managing major peaks in demand. Getting more resources to deal with increased requests at peak times could take days or even weeks. And the use of new technologies involved a slow process to incorporate them into Mercadona's IT processes.
In this context, Mercadona's teams started developing Activo2, an application to train and inform all the company's employees. With a format similar to that of a social network—streamlining communications—Activo2 also lets the company access important information about employees' day-to-day activities, from work schedules and vacations to payroll and tax withholdings.
This solution gave Mercadona total control and the visibility needed to respond rapidly to any requests and incidents that may arise. The use of Kubernetes—the Google Cloud product for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications—enabled Mercadona to monitor resource use and respond automatically in periods of high demand when up to 20,000 requests may be received every minute.
Due to the success of Activo2, Mercadona currently has around 60 applications running in Google Cloud, and expects this number to keep growing. It also has 15 GKE clusters in Google Cloud, in addition to more than 300 Cloud SQL instances, and the entire SAP infrastructure. Thanks to its technology, experience, and knowledge, Google Cloud has been, and will continue to be, a key partner in Mercadona's digitalization.
"The deployment of Activo2 in Google Cloud lets us optimize resource use by up to 70% in periods of lower demand. We've also achieved very good response times that improve the user experience."
—Óscar Morcillo, Cloud Manager at Mercadona ITIT talent
The success of Activo2 paved the way for cloud standardization at Mercadona. It was then time to take the next step: migrating existing applications to the cloud and creating new cloud-native applications, both public (together with Google Cloud) and private. With these applications, Mercadona was looking to expand the limits of the digital world to the management of its internal processes and the experience of its customers.
The advantages of the cloud have been harnessed to keep leading this transformation from within the company, with IT talent that not only has expert knowledge of the latest technologies, languages, and industry trends, but above all shares the vision of innovating and pushing boundaries. So, Mercadona has gone from having an IT team of just 300 people in 2017 to over 1,000 currently, with professionals who are highly specialized in areas such as application development, the cloud, data management, and cybersecurity.
"We're very happy with the value that Google Cloud is giving us, such as rapid innovation, streamlined changes, and scalability," says Juanjo López, Director of Systems and Communications at Mercadona IT.
"We have a golden rule at Mercadona, which is to always work with specialist providers whose solutions ensure the highest quality, best service, and best price. Google Cloud fits perfectly into this equation."
—Irene Arques, IT Procurement Manager at Mercadona ITMercadona and Google Cloud today
Today, Mercadona works with a hybrid cloud solution to capture the best of the private cloud and Google Cloud. Thanks to its focus on automation, the company can now deploy the infrastructure needed for any application in just 15 minutes. The Mercadona case shows how a company can transform and adapt to today's challenges with the support of a reliable and enabling partner.
The future of Mercadona IT involves consolidating this technological team and progressing further with the modernization and reengineering of more than 300 applications, ensuring transparent portability between the private and public clouds. Developments in the cloud and Google Cloud itself will continue to be a part of this formula for success.
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Mercadona
Mercadona, a family-owned company, is one of the leading brick-and-mortar and online supermarkets in Spain. Founded in 1977, it currently has 1,628 stores throughout Spain, 41 in Portugal, and a workforce of 99,000 people. All of this enables Mercadona to help more than 5.7 million households satisfy their grocery, personal care, and pet care needs.