Louis Delhaize Group

Louis Delhaize Group

The Louis Delhaize Group is a Belgian international food retailer Group, which operates in Belgium, Luxembourg, France, the French West Indies and Hungary under the Cora, Match, Profi and Comax brands. The Group employs more than 43,300 people and has a turnover of 9 billion €. The Louis Delhaize Group counts about 665 (700) outlets and more than 8500 tills in its chain of hypermarkets, supermarkets and discount stores. In 2003, the Group announced his intention to further develop the Hungarian retail market in more regional areas, namely in Romania, Serbia and Montenegro.

The Challenge

In 1999, Louis Delhaize Group’s Coordination Director issued a call for tender to re-equip the Group’s outlets with new Point-of Sales systems, the main challenge was to find a strong partner that would be able to perfectly fulfil the Group’s technical and business expansion requirements. The retail information systems had to converge throughout the different group entities to ensure IT consistency and to create cost and operational synergies, while respecting the needs of the different store formats, hyper-, super- and discount. Diversity in terms of country, brand, shop format and local needs had to be taken into account.

The POS system that the Group was looking for had to be:

• An Open-system: which means that the system had to be easily connected to any peripheral (Electronic Fund Transfer, Scanning, CRM, Anti-Fraud systems, etc.) and had not to lock the Group into a specific technology,
• Sizeable: the system had to be working as efficiently in a 2-till shop as in a hypermarket with 40 tills,
• Scalable: the system had to be powerful enough to meet all of today’s and tomorrow’s in-store technology needs,
• Euro-compliant: the POS systems had to be fully Euro-compliant to ensure the smooth transition to the Euro and respect the new legislation related to the euro introduction.
• Multilingual: the system had to work in a multitude of languages. Country-specific: the system had to adapt to each country’s requirements (eg: EFT is different in all countries).

The Solution proposed by Fujitsu Services was retained (to the detriment of IBM and Siemens-Nixdorf) because it was fully meeting the Louis Delhaize Group’s needs. Since the success of Fujitsu Services’ work on its initial contract, has further highlighted the depth of Fujitsu’s relationship with Louis Delhaize and has translated into the ongoing provision of services to other entities within the Group. Today Louis Delhaize Group has two contracts with Fujitsu Services: the first concerns integration and implementation of cash registers, and the second is for support maintenance.

The Solution

Fujitsu Services implemented Fujitsu’s TeamPos Point-of-Sales hardware and ISS 400 Point-of-Sales software to provide a single, integrated and flexible solution throughout the Group that would be able to meet the full span of outlets needs, from the smallest shop to the biggest hypermarket. Most importantly, the new POS systems ensure optimal business continuance thanks to their powerful resilience technology. TeamPos and ISS 400 are built around an advanced open platform, which reduces dependence on multiple systems and vendors and enable the connection to a multitude of peripherals. The scalability of TeamPos and ISS 400 will also enable Louis Delhaize to respond swiftly to changing customer and technological opportunities. The new systems are powerful enough to run the latest electronic marketing and consumer applications, enabling the Louis Delhaize Group to implement creative and more powerful consumer programs. Some unique features within TeamPos makes it easy to maintain, expand and upgrade, thereby enabling Fujitsu Services to be reactive to any developments Louis Delhaize would ask for. Last but not least, the solution proposed to the Louis Delhaize Group enables them get a better picture on all their profit/loss posts by controlling their stock movements, monetary and marketing flows in an optimal way.

The Benefits

As a result of the new POS implementation and the Louis Delhaize Group’s close working relationship with Fujitsu, the Group has realised significant business and operational benefits:

• Increased Customers’ Throughput: the number of customers throughput at till lanes has increased by more than 25%, thereby increasing customer satisfaction and bottom-line profitability!
• Increased Quantity of Decision-Support Information: the POS systems gather a rich breadth of new decision-support information that can be analysed by the headquarters.
• Reduced processing time to make information available to HQ: the period of time to transfer information from the POS to the headquarters has dropped down from 7 days to 1 day.
• Increased user-friendliness: the data mining tools provided by the new system to analyse customer data are more user friendly than the competitor’s tools used before.
• Increased control over monetary flows: this is a new feature for the Louis Delhaize Group that enables them to monitor monetary flows (EFT, lunch vouchers, etc.), from source to destination as well as identify the different actors involved in this money flow. For instance, this is a feature that enables the Group to launch cross-matched promotions and even check the similarity between the folder and shop prices.

The Implementation

The whole project was extremely successful, being completed in a very short timescale and without any disruption to trading. More than 80 outlets were equipped with TeamPos and ISS400 in a 2 month-time period. Fujitsu Services’ professionalism and can-do attitude were particularly appreciated when Fujitsu was put to the test in September 1999. Louis Delhaize announced to Fujitsu that they would have to replace their POS systems in Hungary to ensure Y2K compliancy. Fujitsu took up the challenge very successfully, which further strengthened the confidence between Fujitsu and Louis Delhaize!

The Expertise

Louis Delhaize chose Fujitsu because of its extensive retail capability and experience and knowledge of its business. Fujitsu has more than 40 years experience in the retail world and mission-critical systems’ implementation. Our Belgian retail department’s specialists all come from the retail world and thus have an in-depth knowledge of the retailing profession and its specific requirements. The other winning strengths of Fujitsu were their very good interrelationship skills and flexibility, their international presence, their willingness to provide an acceptable level of transparency and their financial solidity.