ALDI: Realising additional value through end of service life asset support
Learn how the retailer gained flexibility and peace of mind within their IT environment when they switched maintenance providers.
ALDI
ALDI is a family-owned discount supermarket chain with over 10,000 stores in 19 countries.
ALDI opened its first Australian store in 2001 and now has more than 550 stores nationwide. Its rapid growth has made ALDI one of Australia’s top ten retailers: influencing grocery prices, improving the perception of private-label goods, and introducing numerous innovative market initiatives.
Key benefits
- Consolidated hardware contracts to streamline billing and support
- Increased support of critical devices with best-in-market SLA
- Highest coverage of sites across Australia with local warehouses
- Greater cost-savings with support to end of service life devices
Requiring a ‘good different’ support provider to keep up with demand
ALDI has taken a simplified approach to business, setting itself apart from competitors.
They understand the importance of efficiency and through streamlined operations, ALDI can offer their customers premium products for the lowest prices. They have coined themselves as ‘good different’ within the industry and this ‘difference’ has been shown through winning multiple CANSTAR customer satisfaction awards over the years. With hundreds of locations across Australia, ALDI needs to make sure its store and business operations are running smoothly and relies heavily on their internal IT systems always working for this.
Their store and distribution networks are critical in this streamlined approach. ALDI’s distribution network ensures that each location across Australia has the right stock levels every day to serve the needs of the local community. People rely on ALDI to have the essentials, especially in remote areas of Australia making an outage in this network serious. ALDI’s human resource department require access to store networks as well, sometimes remotely, to update staff rosters and manage the payroll platform. The network is a key element of what makes ALDI effective.
With its rapid expansion across Australia, ALDI had a complex network with multiple vendors and service level agreements which resulted in issues maintaining its centralised operations. Opening new stores in remote areas became an issue when IT hardware failures occurred as many vendors have slow response times and no local warehouses or stocked parts.
Streamlined support for a fast-moving environment
In choosing Interactive as a hardware maintenance provider, ALDI was able to simplify its IT services.
Interactive provided a streamlined approach, matching ALDI’s business approach, through a single hardware maintenance contract and 24×7 Australian-based service desk for ALDI’s 1200 Cisco, IBM and Dell devices at more than 550 stores and distribution centres in ANZ.
This premium service level agreement has been invaluable to ALDI as they continue to expand across Australia. When ALDI opened a new store in Torrington, QLD, on a peak trading Wednesday, the launch and day’s trading took place without a hitch, but Interactive was there in the background ensuring it went smoothly. What many people don’t know is that the network experienced IT failures in the week leading up to the high-profile opening. Interactive responded quickly to replace faulty equipment and restore normal IT operations, and the big day was able to go ahead as planned.
The key reasons ALDI chose Interactive included: cultural alignment; Interactive’s flexible monthly cost and pricing model; support for multiple vendors; and concurrent contract arrangements for all devices added over time. Ultimately, it was a tour of Interactive’s St Leonards operations that solidified the decision. ALDI’s executive team was impressed with the attention to detail and design of Interactive’s storage facilities and data centre, and customer engagement at all levels of the organisation.
ALDI’s vision is to enable Australian shoppers to live richer lives for less. All people, wherever they live should have the opportunity to buy everyday groceries of the highest quality at the lowest possible price. Cost-effective and optimal hardware maintenance assists ALDI to achieve its overall goal to keep grocery prices low.
Realising ongoing value from ongoing support
Interactive understood the importance of ALDI’s network and how it was critical to operations.
To ensure they were always covered, Interactive tailored a set of service level agreements from standard 4-hour on-site response to high availability, 2-hour on-site service at more business-critical times of the day and week at ADLI’s different stores and distribution centres. No matter the location of ALDI’s store, with Interactive’s support their network services can be quickly restored in cases of a hardware outage. Interactive guarantees spare parts for every device under support and replacement units in local warehouses across Australia.
One of the biggest benefits for ALDI has been from Interactive’s support of existing end-of-life (EOL) and end-of-service-life (EOSL) infrastructure, as well as in-warranty and other devices in operation. This level of service has enabled ALDI to realise the additional value and ‘sweat its assets’ by extending the life of older equipment still performing effectively. The agreement also has the flexibility for devices to be added or removed from the contract, which is ideal for the dynamic and competitive nature of the retail industry.
