Nobody enjoys grocery shopping
Mercadona is a leading family-owned retailer with more than 1640 stores in Spain and Portugal, hiring over 95 thousand people. No company in Spain has a turnover as high as Mercadona (nearly 27 billion euros) and is the most attractive employer in the country.
For those of you who don’t know Mercadona Tech yet, it is a spin-off of Mercadona and is in charge of the new online solution revolutionizing the grocery shopping experience. Our tech team is formed by 150 motivated people ready to go above and beyond what is expected. Although to create the entire online experience there are 1900 employees located in Valencia, Madrid, Alicante, Sevilla and Barcelona. Our objective is to create a simple and intuitive online experience for our customers, complementing a supply chain that strives for efficient logistics through technology.
What we do at Mercadona Tech is combining technology with operations, and through our internal tools, facilitate routine work in our five Colmenas and optimize the processes mentioned above. Currently, we have eight multidisciplinary teams working in eight verticals. Only two of them are responsible for the user app; the other teams focus on issues related to the provisioning of our warehouses, preparation of orders, their dispatch, and distribution. (10/2021)
The first vertical, Market it is responsible for the experience of making the purchase (adding the products to the cart) from the different sections of the platform (home, search engine, categories) and for the internal tools to manage the different catalogs per store, having the products with the necessary information so that customers can identify them without mistake.
The Checkout (XO) team is in charge of the experience of payments and collections, user accounts, accounting reports to Mercadona, and ACMO tools. ACMO, that’s how we call the customer service of Mercadona Online.
The Supply team oversees the provision of hives, stock management and control, and allows us to maintain key efficiency levels which help to accurately manage warehouses or logistics.
Hive (Colmena) creates and manages the warehouse map, the repositioning of products that come from the logistics center, and the order preparation process.
The Delivery vertical supervises consolidation, which is the physical administration of prepared orders and physical space management. They are also in charge of loading up the trucks and the part called Last Mile, that is, route planning, route calculation, and delivery management. We have about 300 eco-friendly trucks at our disposal.
A vertical called Organization predicts the maximum resources needed and decides how much manpower would be required to make the service as efficient as possible.
In the Offer (Capacity) team, we forecast how much we will sell, translating that into the availability of slots offered every day and every hour. Our data team is very involved here to provide predictions and estimations.
Our newest vertical dedicated to NTC (Nueva TeleCompra) manages the logistics process for locations without a dedicated warehouse. The order is consolidated in the store where picking and a map of the store are necessary to facilitate operations and offer training for employees.
Apart from the e-commerce platform, which everyone can see, we develop internal tools to service the online shopping workflow.
The most significant part of our project is not visible to the final customer but it facilities the work of the personnel responsible for preparing the order.
A reality that we build together, from the first click to the client’s home.
Our colleagues proudly say that because of working in creative, versatile teams, they have a continuous learning experience, making them grow as professionals, share their expertise, and feel that they create something unique.
Thanks to the highly qualified team, we can make the online shopping experience less painful and less time-consuming for our Jefe, what we call our client. The most demanding feature when thinking about grocery shopping is that it allows you to repeat an order and modify it according to your needs on the day of the purchase.
Pablo Serrano, our Product Manager, highlights the importance of creating a clean app for the users that makes the process simple for all generations, requires the minimum information at check out, and allows you to finalize the purchase in a moment.
It’s satisfying to work on something that changes the lives of many, many people. The impact it has on society is vast, and that’s the main reason which drives us forward, he says.
We are a Product Engineering team, so we believe that excellence in development must be at the service of our product. Every day we fill the belly of more than 7000 families and move more than 600 tons of food thanks to the new online store and the logistics tools that we have developed 100% in-house.
Modernizing the online channel of the most prominent Spanish supermarket chain is an opportunity that is rarely available.
Public APIs with 30 calls per second, 3 Million messages processed every day, 100 production releases per week, 99.979% uptime, finding the most efficient routes for our delivery service, automating the purchase of our customers, or robotizing our warehouses are the challenges which we face daily, are you up for joining us?
Check out our open positions here.
The Mercadona Model of Total Quality is an innovative, shared, and sustainable growth organization that aims to satisfy, in this sequential order and with the same importance, the five components of the company: “The Boss” (Client), The Worker, The Supplier, Society, and Capital.
We are working on expanding our service through the country.
