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September 11, 2023

Coles accelerates from monthly to weekly application deployments with Azure

To create an outstanding e-commerce experience that digitizes and modernizes shopping for customers on every channel, leading Australian supermarket brand Coles sought a partner to help streamline development processes and efficiently integrate updates and feedback. Whether customers are in-store, online, or engaged in a hybrid experience with their mobile app, Coles is committed to creating and delivering a consistently great experience, backed by data and insights. As they continue to expand their e-commerce capabilities, they leverage Microsoft solutions to empower their development and engineering teams.

Coles

“Instead of doing six-week releases, we now do weekly releases. And the build times now take roughly 10 to 15 minutes, compared to what used to be a couple of hours.”

Anton Vishnyakov, Senior Engineer and Manager for Platform Engineering, Coles

When it comes to the retail business, an integrated omnichannel strategy is the name of the game. While many industries have seen customer preferences shift to online-only options, supermarket shoppers are all about convenience. In fact, their preferences for an online or in-store experience shift daily based on what they need and when they need it. Some days, a customer might be excited to pop into the store for their items while just days later, they prefer to place an online order and pick-up their groceries during a hectic afternoon. In either case, customers want to be able to get exactly what they need, in a way that suits their needs that day. 

This shift in customer behavior and expectation begs the question: What if your development team could keep pace with shifting attitudes and needs by making continuous, even daily, updates to web and brand experiences? That’s exactly what Coles is doing. 

Coles has put customers at the center of its business for a long time. Coles knew it was time to start incorporating e-commerce strategies and systems as early as 12 years ago, long before the pandemic forced everyone to move online. “Really, for us, it’s about the changing needs of our customers,” says Patrik Mihailescu, Senior Engineering Manager, Web, at Coles Group. “Not just recently through COVID, but really looking to support customer preference around being able to shop online and also in store. We’re really pushing a lot around the omnichannel strategy, because we find that customers have a preference for both.”

And beyond the binary of in-store and online shopping, Coles has identified its mobile experience as a uniquely hybrid experience: Customers use the Coles mobile app while they are in-store to find items and shop more quickly. “They can actually carry that experience with them and have that integrated into their visit to the store,” says Benedict Lowndes, Senior Engineering Manager on the Coles App team. Using customer insights data to drive decisions is a major part of future planning: “We use the customer behavior data we have to make sure we are providing the right products to give our customers the best experience possible,” says John Cox, Chief Technology Officer at Coles.

In order to continue delivering dynamic e-commerce experiences online, in-store, and everywhere in-between, Coles needed a partner who could keep up with its innovative, agile business model and empower its use of data to drive better customer experience. Coles deepened its existing relationship with Microsoft, by integrating the use of Azure. This allowed for faster deployments with a highly collaborative engineering process and delivered secure and safe web-based experiences for its customers.

Microsoft Azure services empower a customer-first mindset

Coles already has a mature perspective about how it wants to serve its customers. Having a customer-first, convenience-centric outlook meant that Coles needed technological services and software to help deliver incredible experiences, no matter where or how its customer decided to interact with Coles. Coles also wanted to better utilize data to ensure that the customer insights it had available were put to the best use.

When working on a new project, Mihailescu says Coles doesn’t want all its engineers’ energy going toward asking questions about getting things up and running: “We actually want engineers to be focusing on ‘what is the service doing?’ ‘What are we actually trying to achieve?’ The Azure Kubernetes Service has helped us to standardize and reduce that sort of effort” says Mihailescu.

Coles is also using data and AI to address customer needs, including “to predict what products need to be at what store at what time,” says Cox. “Our entire supply chain is being driven through a machine learning engine. So, it is giving insight at a super localized level. We’re also using it to ensure that we are scheduling our team members based on customer demand and making sure we keep the shelves stocked appropriately.”

Coles takes customer feedback seriously—and its teams wanted to integrate productive updates and changes as quickly as possible to address friction points, add new features, and streamline processes. With Azure DevOps, Coles has been able to achieve staggering efficiency by shifting from monthly to weekly deployments. In fact, according to Anton Vishnyakov, Senior Engineer and Manager for Platform Engineering at Coles, “Instead of doing six-week releases, we now do weekly releases. And the build times now take roughly 10 to 15 minutes, compared to what used to be a couple of hours.” 

The customer experience is further optimized through the use of Azure Cosmos DB, which provides an aggregated view across channels to enable further customer insights, allowing Coles to provide an even more customized experience. Together, Cosmos DB and Azure Kubernetes Service help Coles leverage Open AI to create transformative solutions that benefit customers.

Microsoft Azure enables Coles to move as quickly and effectively as it is capable of, without taking on added risk. “Azure DevOps tooling definitely enabled us to be able to rapidly deploy changes to production by allowing us to safely create changes, to test those independently before they were merged into our master branch…and to create rapid pipelines,” says Mihailescu, who states that the Azure toolset “allows us to be really nimble and flexible.” In fact, he adds that using Azure App Service, the team can test updates with ease: “We deploy during our peak periods where customers are on the site, but through the work that we’ve done we have zero downtime. There is no impact to our customers.” The Coles team also uses Azure API Management gateway to ensure secure payment and processing for online shoppers by identifying, blocking, and countering fraudulent activity and bot attempts to enter the site.

Azure empowers their app team, too, according to Lowndes. “If a customer provides feedback that they’re having challenges with checking out, we can really drill-in with confidence and identify what range of issues they might be experiencing and then plan around how to remediate that.” Using Azure tools, Coles has been able to effectively scale its development processes to make meaningful changes for customers and get them live and available much faster. “I’ve found Azure an incredibly accessible but powerful toolkit that we can tap into to ensure that we are on top of customer issues,” says Lowndes.

Beyond that, Coles worked with Gold-Certified Microsoft Partner Azenix to drive improvements in its pipelines. Azenix reviewed current pipeline status and structure, provided analysis, and created custom build services to meet specific needs, which took build time down to 15 or 20 minutes. Of Azenix, Mihailescu says, “they understood the Microsoft service set well. They hit the ground running, really to be able to plug in some of the gaps we had.” The Azenix team also brought deep collaboration, where they shared knowledge through brown bags and other sessions to upskill the entire team. With these support systems and partnerships in place, Coles can continue growing and honing a truly customer-centric approach to business.

Moving fast to meet customer expectations

Using Azure, the Coles team has been able to “break that culture of midnight deployments,” says Mihailescu. “We deploy during business hours.” They’re able to make significant updates to their web and mobile app experiences without disrupting or confusing customers mid-journey. The effects have been so meaningful and the impacts so noticeable that the team is now shifting to an even faster deployment schedule, thanks to the capabilities that Azure offers: “We’re going to be moving to daily deployments in the next six to nine months and definitely with the Azure tooling, that’s going to be super key in enabling us to go even quicker,” says Mihailescu.

Seamless integration across the platform makes work even easier and faster. “All those systems talk to each other and they’re deeply, deeply integrated,” says Vishnyakov, which allows the team “to move really quickly and focus on delivering application services instead of spending time on planning.” Compared to past models, which took the team two weeks to get a single API running, Azure DevOps streamlines the process to less than half a day.

By deepening their relationship with Microsoft to deploy Azure DevOps, App Service, API Management, and Azure Kubernetes Service, Coles has found a partner to match their agility and intelligence in meeting customer expectations with an omnichannel strategy. “Microsoft basically teaches our engineers how to use and render value from Azure services,” says Vishnyakov. By working closely together with Microsoft experts, the Coles team has been able to continue delivering seamless, well-orchestrated experiences to customers on every single channel. 

“I’ve found it an incredibly accessible but powerful toolkit that we can tap into to ensure that we are on top of customer issues.”

Benedict Lowndes, Senior Engineering Manager on the Coles App team, Coles

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