Colruyt Group’s early and ongoing embrace of digital technologies has helped the European grocery chain improve its customers’ shopping experience and increase the efficiency of in-store production and logistics operations. Headquartered in Belgium, the family-owned retail corporation operates over 600 grocery stores under various brand names in Belgium, France, and Luxembourg.

Automation is critical to the company’s business goals, says Brechtel Dero, division manager at Colruyt Group, particularly in one of its largest brands, Colruyt Lowest Prices, which guarantees the lowest price for every product. “Our market promise is literally in our name, so it drives us to be innovative,” he explains. “Automation is critical for achieving our market promise while maintaining profitability.”

“Automating labor-intensive processes and tasks allows us to be more efficient than our competitors,” he says. “We’re investing in the most labor-intensive retail areas: distribution, supply chain, and sales. Those are the areas with the most to gain.”

For instance, as part of its commitment to providing customer-centric shopping experiences, the company’s in-house innovation team has looked for ways to improve its Collect & Go online shopping service. For more than two decades, customers have used the service to place grocery orders for pickup at a future time at their local Colruyt store.

Until recently, many of the orders were collected at a local warehouse and stored in refrigerators until the customers arrived for pickup—a process that was inefficient and also left room for errors in the cold chain. To improve the efficiency of the end-to-end distribution of orders from a central warehouse to pickup points at the local stores and ensure an unbroken cold chain, the retailer developed a coolbox with passive cooling plates inside.

“With passive cooling, we needed to ensure the box stays cool and demonstrate to regulators that we have control of the cold chain,” explains Dero. “So we installed sensors in each box and connected them to an IoT [Internet of Things] platform, which measures the temperature in the box at all times and notifies us if the cold chain has been breached.”

This keeps the goods inside the boxes cool for 24 hours or more, and by eliminating the need for refrigeration, it reduces the amount of handling. More importantly, says Dero, it opens the door for long-term, at-scale grocery delivery, without the need for refrigerated trucks. Colruyt is already piloting the use of the technology for grocery delivery in some of its urban markets.

In addition, restocking aisles can be very labor-intensive for a store stocking thousands of products, particularly the process of finding the exact shelf location for specific products. Colruyt’s in-house innovation team used its existing electronic price labels, workers’ smartphones, and IoT to develop a product finder application. Workers scan an item, causing a light to flash on the electronic shelf label, letting them know exactly where to stock merchandise. The application, which is being piloted at the chain’s biggest store, saves up to 90 minutes per worker per day.

Behind the scenes, Colruyt is upgrading its existing inventory management system, which automatically tracks and manages inventory levels. The retailer is testing the use of computer vision technology within the system to provide an additional layer of inventory control. With the current system, inventory mistakes can happen if the numbers in the system are incorrect. Cameras with computer vision can detect when there’s an inventory anomaly on the shelves.

“In the future, we expect computer vision to be foundational in helping the store develop a real-time digital twin of each store,” says Dero. “That way, we will know what’s happening at every moment.”

Other automation-driven operations and shopping experiences include an AI-driven checkout system that is able to visually identify groceries using image recognition instead of barcode reading, speeding up the checkout process by 20 percent; Belgium’s first cashier-less convenience store, which eliminates the traditional checkout process; and even custom self-driving vehicles that can be used to deliver groceries and transport goods to distribution centers.

“Using tech is in the DNA of our company,” says Dero. “It’s the only way to survive in a competitive retail landscape.”

Enbridge, is a transportation company that plays a pivotal role in North America's energy landscape, transporting 30% of the crude oil and 20% of the natural gas consumed in the United States. We’re also making significant strides in renewable energy as the largest natural gas utility in North America, servicing more than 7 million customers—and we’re continuing to grow, with the announcement of recent acquisitions.

From 2015 to 2020, Enbridge experienced unprecedented growth due to mergers and acquisitions, resulting in a 150% increase in its technology footprint. If the company had continued at the same pace, it would have had to deal with an additional 50% increase in the forecasted footprint, which would entail increased costs, a complex technology landscape, and workload challenges.

Enbridge had to manage and scale multiple platforms, applications, and data centers while relying on legacy systems that posed security and performance risks. It realized we needed to transform our technology landscape to support our business goals and enable innovation. To address these challenges, the company embarked on a journey to the cloud that aimed to simplify IT, reduce operational risk, enhance business agility, and improve operational efficiencies.

Their journey began with a strategic focus on reducing technical debt and enhancing application reliability through cloud adoption. The results were promising: Enbridge consolidated 13 data centers, with 74% of our workloads now running in the cloud. This transition allowed it to achieve a 66% reduction in our carbon footprint.

Furthermore, it reduced critical service outages by 70%. Enbridge met new regulatory demands by reducing patching cycle times by 67%. In total, it migrated 594 applications to the cloud, including essential workforce productivity tools. This effort not only reduced operational risk but also established a highly reliable hybrid environment. It decommissioned 9,050 servers, addressing outdated technology and achieving an impressive availability rate of 99.5%.

Enbridge’s cloud migration also harnessed the power of our data and transformed our business intelligence. It migrated our siloed data to a cloud-based data marketplace, where we created a data catalog and implemented data quality standards. It applied advanced data governance and security measures to protect our data assets, enabling the company to democratize data access and help its business users make data-driven decisions. Furthermore, Enbridge used cloud-native artificial intelligence and machine learning tools to generate insights and predictions from i9ts data, such as demand forecasting, asset optimization, and anomaly detection.

The company’s cloud migration was not just about enhancing reliability and reducing environmental impact; it was also about transforming its business operations. It reduced infrastructure deployment times from a sluggish four months on premises to a mere four hours in the cloud. Additionally, it expedited “day 1” integration times, reducing them by 30%. This ensured Enbridge could adapt to emerging business demands and cope with increasing regulatory pressures, particularly in cybersecurity.

Their infrastructure costs, which would have otherwise risen by 52%, instead reduced by 50%, alongside substantial savings in network bandwidth. This migration enhanced its operational efficiency and helped save significant costs.

Crucially, Enbridge invested in upskilling its workforce, with 60% of their technology information services employees now possessing cloud training and agile development skills. This transformation enabled Enbridge to attract and retain talent proficient in emerging technologies with which job seekers want to work.

Their cloud journey also helped the company in its sustainability journey. Enbridge has set an environmental target of achieving zero emissions by 2050. By reducing the number of data centers from 17 in 2015 to just four today and shifting workloads to cloud data centers powered by renewable energy, Enbridge has so far reduced its total carbon footprint by 66%.

One of the most exciting outcomes of the company’s cloud journey is the revival of AI at Enbridge. While AI has been part of their operations for a few years in various forms, including pipeline inspection gauges, leak detection systems, and corrosion monitoring systems, their migration to the cloud has unlocked new possibilities for AI applications. These AI solutions have the potential to enhance its operations, improve safety, elevate the customer experience, and enhance its environmental performance.

Capitalizing on their cloud, DevOps, and data capabilities, Enbridge set up a generative AI platform, a cutting-edge AI solution. It leveraged AI-powered code assistant copilots to accelerate delivery, driving innovation and efficiency. In addition, the company is rolling out a productivity application copilot—an AI tool to help staff work smarter—to 300 users.

“AI is not merely a buzzword for us; it is a crucial enabler for the energy transition and a catalyst for innovation,” says Joseph Gollapalli, director of cloud, IT ops, and data, at Enbridge.

The state of Utah’s Office of Recovery Services (ORS) has a singular goal: to promote responsibility. One of the agency’s critical functions is to establish and enforce child support orders and collect child support. Its case management and accounting system, the Office of Recovery Services Information System (ORSIS), is central to agency operations.

Recently, the agency decided the time had come to modernize ORSIS’ 25-year-old COBOL-based mainframe application. Modernizing applications on the mainframe could only be done by creating web applications on separate, connected servers, so ORSIS had more than 100 such surrounding systems, including employee- and public-facing web applications. “It had become very cost-prohibitive to maintain, and we weren’t able to scale or change processes,” explains Bart Mason, technology lead for the ORS. “It had an outdated user interface that was challenging for our agents to use. And we had a hard time finding COBOL developers to support it.”

Given the task of moving ORSIS off the mainframe, Mason and his team explored two options: rewriting the application from scratch or migrating it to a public cloud. Rewriting ORSIS would have cost approximately US$200 million; the new system would have then needed to be certified by federal agencies, adding five to 10 years to the development process. “Those kinds of budgets and timelines don’t exist for us,” says Mason. “There was absolutely no way we could do this, so we went with cloud migration.”

Using a fully automated refactoring tool to migrate the code and data, ORS transformed its COBOL-based application to a Java-based system running on a public cloud, which was significantly more cost-effective than rewriting the application. This approach enabled incremental migration.

“We were able to take the functionality that was on the mainframe, convert the code to Java, and move it over to the cloud,” Mason says. “The advantage of doing a one-for-one migration is that we were able to easily retrain our COBOL developers to work on the new system. They knew the old system very well, and we didn’t want to lose them. Now they’re able to work in Java and Python, and we’ve moved from a waterfall development process to Agile.”

Because the replatformed application did not have to be certified by federal agencies, ORS was able to complete the project in 18 months.

The agency has recognized several benefits from migrating ORSIS to the cloud. The cloud-based system is vastly more economical to maintain than its predecessor. “It’s really helped us corral our costs because we’re now able to leverage other cloud services and SaaS applications, which has reduced software licensing fees,” Mason says.

It also provides a viable disaster recovery solution and allows the agency to take advantage of cloud-native digital technologies such as analytics, mobile applications, process automation, and artificial intelligence. It also simplifies the process of complying with ever-evolving federal mandates, state and local legislation, and security requirements. “We have to constantly make changes to meet these requirements,” explains Mason. “That’s easier and faster to do with the cloud-based application.”

Finally, migrating to the cloud helped the ORSIS achieve a key objective: to make it easier for both internal and external stakeholders to access the information they need. “We not only needed to make the system easier for agents to operate and navigate; we also needed to make it easier to provide services to the public,” Mason says. “The new system enables us to automate many public-facing aspects for our constituents.”

Mason says that modernization is an ongoing process for ORS: “It’s not easy, but it's essential. There’s always going to be additions and changes. If you become complacent, you’ll end up with a 26-year-old system again.”