Standardized API development across 27 feature development teams and 91 software engineers
Enabled seamless integration of partners to a 1.7 million-member loyalty program
Supported ~180 million requests per month
Woolworths New Zealand chose Apigee X to modernize its API management, support new initiatives like its Everyday Rewards program, and improve security and partner integrations.
Woolworths New Zealand chose Apigee X to modernize its API management, support new initiatives like its Everyday Rewards program, and improve security and partner integrations.
Composable commerce is key to our business, and API management through Apigee X from Google Cloud is very much in line with this theme.
Gayani Mahawatte
Senior Technical Product Manager, Developer and Platform Services, Woolworths New Zealand
Leading grocery retailer Woolworths New Zealand contributes an estimated $1.6 billion to Aotearoa New Zealand’s annual GDP and is the country’s leading private-sector employer. More than 20,000 team members are employed across 185 stores, support offices, processing plants, and distribution centers.
Over the last two to three years, Woolworths New Zealand has developed an API strategy that enables organizational agility and modernization, supporting our ability to react quickly to changing market conditions. This is intended to enable experiences across channels such as the retailer’s online store, mobile app, and Everyday Rewards loyalty program website and app.
“With multiple digital channels, and partner integrations for Everyday Rewards, our priority is to enable a way of exposing APIs quickly in a standard way, for consumption in a standard way,” said Gayani Mahawatte, Senior Technical Product Manager, Developer and Platform Services, Woolworths New Zealand. “We also prioritize security, traceability, and observability of traffic so we can meet our service level objectives (SLOs) consistently. Apigee X enables us to move fast on partner, channel, and application integrations, allowing us to innovate faster by leveraging network effects provided by our API strategy.
With 27 feature development teams and 91 software engineers, Woolworths New Zealand created the golden paths (automated templates that integrate code and tooling to increase developer velocity) to ensure ease of enabling APIs within our organization.”
A heightened focus on security, developer experience, and the planned launch in New Zealand of an Everyday Rewards loyalty program incorporating partner organizations, added impetus to the organization’s API strategy and modernization program.
“We reviewed our options for an API gateway and formally selected Apigee X in mid 2022,” said Mahawatte. “The product met all our functional requirements and was cloud agnostic, supporting the broader organization’s multi-cloud approach.”
Choosing Apigee X also helped Woolworths New Zealand execute plans to align more closely with the business in Australia. “Composable commerce is key to our business, and API management through Apigee X from Google Cloud is very much in line with this theme,” said Mahawatte.
Driving higher productivity and lower costs
Deploying Apigee X enables Woolworths New Zealand developer and platform services to drive improvements in developer productivity and cost optimization. “Apigee X helps accelerate API provisioning and consumption and this drives customer speed to value that uplifts and scales technological innovation,” said Mahawatte. “An API-centric approach also promotes ease of reuse to minimize the duplication of effort.”
Because a standardized edge API gateway can be created with a few clicks each time a new service is created, engineers and partners can build new services faster, while CI/CD policies are incorporated to enforce service and API security. Observability, alerting, and monitoring run across all traffic coming into services exposed via Apigee X, with Dynatrace used to continuously monitor the health of Apigee services.
Training sessions across our development chapters ensured we obtained the necessary buy-in to the new solution from our engineering chapter leads and solution architects,” said Mahawatte. “As our teams build more and more APIs for our new products, the value we derive from Apigee X will only increase.
Gayani Mahawatte
Senior Technical Product Manager, Developer and Platform Services, Woolworths New Zealand
The product’s security features are particularly important to a business that provides services to nearly one million users per week. “Apigee X helps us apply the correct governance and controls to keep data secure and meet the expectations of our customers and other internal and external stakeholders,” said Mahawatte.
The developer and platform services team worked with Google Cloud Partner and professional services firm Cognizant on an optimal solution design. “Cognizant was experienced in working with Apigee X, and had engaged with Woolworths Australia as well, so we were able to utilize its expertise and that of the Google Cloud team to implement the API gateway,” said Mahawatte.
The team undertook a rigorous infrastructure design process with the Woolworths Group in Australia to meet the broader organization’s strict security controls. “This was an extensive process incorporating checks and balances to ensure Apigee X and our configurations were compliant and a top-end product suitable for our business,” said Mahawatte. “We knew Apigee X could provide the protection we needed, was the right fit, and we were designing an architecture with the correct routing, proxies, and other features needed to deliver.”
The implementation involved collaboration with a working group of technical leads within the organization, reviewing product milestones and outcomes at various stages. Collaborating with Woolworths Group in Australia on networking, cloud, and hosting, the developer services team included specific automation, CI/CD, observability and golden paths in the final product.
To educate developers in the use of Apigee X, Woolworths New Zealand created a center of enablement that provided training and resources such as documentation and video tutorials. “A few training sessions across our development chapters ensured we obtained the necessary buy-in to the new solution from our engineering chapter leads and solution architects,” said Mahawatte. “As our teams build more and more APIs for our new products, the value we derive from Apigee X will only increase.”
Playing an important role in Everyday Rewards program
Working with Google Cloud has been very easy and straightforward, with a lot of comprehensive documentation, and there is a good community and support around its products.
Gayani Mahawatte
Senior Technical Product Manager, Developer and Platform Services, Woolworths New Zealand
Apigee X played an integral role in the launch of the Woolworths New Zealand Everyday Rewards loyalty program on 1 February 2024, which included partners such as bp, ASB Bank, and Vineonline. The business utilized the product to enable the partner gateway and integrations for the program unveiling.
“Through the golden paths created for Apigee X, we were able to provision about seven APIs for the program in two to three weeks,” said Mahawatte.
By July 2024, the program had grown to 1.67 million members who had redeemed more than one million vouchers on groceries and fuel, the equivalent of about $15 million in rewards.
“The product is a big win for our platform, and software engineering teams’ ways of working, and Woolworths New Zealand’s path toward a scalable, secure, and modern architecture,” said Mahawatte. “We are realizing our goal of reducing the lead time to establish and share a new service from weeks to minutes, saving time and creating efficiencies that directly impact business outcomes. We are enabling connected experiences, channels, and API partnerships with speed and scale.”
Nearly 180 million requests now flow through Apigee X per month, delivering improvements in revenue and other business-critical metrics.
As a Woolworths New Zealand customer herself, Mahawatte is extremely pleased that her data is kept secure through Apigee X and grateful that she can access discounts from partners through the Everyday Rewards program. “This helps us realize our mission as a business to make sure customers enjoy exceptional shopping experiences in-store and online.”
Woolworths New Zealand plans to deepen its relationship with Google Cloud through projects such as an advanced API security trial incorporating predictive API security threat detection. The trial involves the addition of a security configuration to APIs in production over several months to identify issues for remediation through policy or other measures.
“It’s been great to have the Google Cloud team on our side through the journey to date and enabling us to trial product extensions or features so we can identify value and determine our next steps,” said Mahawatte. “Overall, working with Google Cloud has been very easy and straightforward, with a lot of comprehensive documentation, and there is a good community and support around its products.”
Woolworths New Zealand is Aotearoa New Zealand’s leading supermarket brand, serving more than three million customers every week from 185 stores that each stock more than 20,000 different products. The business is a subsidiary of the publicly-listed Australian company Woolworths Group Ltd.
Industry: Retail
Location: New Zealand
Products: Apigee X
About Google Cloud Partner- Cognizant
Cognizant is a Google Cloud Partner and professional services firm that provides IT, consulting, and business process services to customers. The firm helps organizations modernize technology, reimagine processes, and transform experiences.
