Our Bread and Butter — Stories of a Mercadona Tech Team
The context
In case you’re reading this from elsewhere in the world, Mercadona is amongst the largest companies in Spain, surpassing all others in 2020 with €27B in revenue. It is the most significant grocery player here by far, a family-owned business with an incredible 25% market share.
At Mercadona Tech, we’re developing the new website, apps, and internal tools that allow Mercadona to offer a totally renewed experience in online shopping. Within Mercadona Tech, we all belong to ‘verticals’ — cross-functional, autonomous teams that focus on one area of our value chain.
In this article, we’re going to talk about the Supply vertical.
The Supply vertical is responsible for the tools and processes that provision our ‘hives’ (Mercadona Online warehouses) and manage their stock. However, recently, we have switched our focus to work on a project for Mercadona’s stores, which we will tell you about today.
The problem
As we mentioned, Mercadona’s main channel is not online, but its brick-and-mortar stores which are very capillary throughout the entire Spanish territory. In these stores, there are several digital tools that our workers use to do their daily work.
One of the tools is called the V4, a web application on a portable device that allows our workers to control our stores’ stock and has been used for almost two decades. What a legend!
Sadly, everything comes to an end, and so does the V4. The manufacturer stopped producing the device in 2020, so Mercadona set to look for a substitute device — and app — for its stores.
The solution
Enter Mercadona Tech. Word had gotten out about the small(ish) group of engineers, operations and product people that made Mercadona’s Online Grocery profitable in under 3 years.
Within Mercadona Tech, the Supply vertical had already developed the replacement of V4 (V5) to manage stocks in the hives in a more automated, precise, and user-friendly way.
It was agreed that we, the Supply vertical, would take on this new project for Mercadona’s physical stores using the same approach and methodology as we were using to develop the Online experience.
The development of the new Android application started its journey mid-May 2021 and was soon coupled to a new Zebra device.
We named the new app ‘V6’ as a tribute to its beloved predecessor.
The scope
Mercadona has, as of December 2021, 1,662 brick-and-mortar stores across Spain and Portugal. These stores collectively have more than 4,000 V4 devices used by over 60,000 employees throughout their working day to manage the stores’ stock.
This is a different scale than we’re used to, as so far we had been working with 3 hives, 3 environments, and the workers of 3 different centers.
Which device should the stores use for our new application? How are we going to deploy to +1,600 stores? How are we going to integrate the old system with the new one? What if our users are too used to the current application and the change is too difficult? How can we give technical support to so many stores?… These were some of the questions that came to our minds, some of which remain unresolved.
The methodology
Under Mercadona Tech’s umbrella, good practices always guide our vertical’s journey. Our bread and butter are philosophies and practices like Lean, Extreme Programming, Clean code, TDD, and Pair/Mob programming.
We make it everyone’s responsibility to understand the problem and be involved in the approach that is shaped. But we do not commit to the approach. It is only by observing the results of small steps and planning iterations accordingly that we manage to hit the problem in the bull’s eye — or close enough, to deliver most of the value with minimum cost.
Communication flows through product, design, engineering, and process. All of us have spoken to our users in the stores or gone to visit a Mercadona warehouse where our stores’ supplies are packaged and delivered.
We put effort into not falling to any bad practices and take continuous improvement seriously.
It’s what we do at Mercadona Tech, and we don’t see software development in any other way.
The future
Indeed, right now, we are focused on adding to V6 every feature our store colleagues currently use in V4. We collect qualitative and quantitative data every day to guide us in giving value to our users along the way to our goal. Our priority is in fact to ensure the 1,662 Mercadona stores are not missing any tool to manage their stock.
What comes after? Replacing V4 is just the beginning.
We aim to improve the quality and the precision of our stock, as this may lead to a better supply and ultimately translate into a better service for our customers.
The challenge(s)
The challenges ahead are clear, but that doesn’t make them any easier. To satisfy the needs of Mercadona. To deploy a practical, agile, intuitive application that will serve as a foundation for better stock and supply in our stores. To drive this project home so it positively impacts the service we give our customer every day. To juggle V6 with the exciting Mercadona Online Supply projects that also are starting to demand our attention again.
It’s both humbling and exciting to be on this journey. And we’re looking for product-oriented, self-driven, eager engineers to help us achieve our mission.
Are you our missing piece? 🙂
Our Team
The Supply vertical is a multidisciplinary team. Those involved in the development of V6 include:
- Product Manager — Cecilia Ughi — Chechi joined Mercadona Tech in July 2020 and started by leading the HiveMap vertical towards ensuring a productive, reliable and scalable organization & replenishment of the products in Mercadona Online warehouses (‘hives’). She is now leading the Supply vertical, now focusing on Mercadona Tech’s first project which is not related to Online Sales. Chechi brings experience from strategic projects in market-leading grocery retail and consumer-goods firms from her previous role in management consulting. She holds a Business Administration degree from the University of Bath (UK). Before that, she mostly grew up in Italy. In her free time, you’ll find Chechi on a hike near Valencia, trying out a new (probably vegetarian) cafe for brunch, or learning to do something new.
- Operations Engineer — Alvaro Vila — Galician industrial engineer. His professional career began ten years ago in pharmaceutical distribution, where he found his passion for logistics and warehousing. After some previous experience in the online food sector, he arrived at Mercadona Tech in November 2019. Since then, he has been working on process improvement and has been involved in all supply chain processes. In his day-to-day, you can see him identifying problems to solve, analyzing their causes, and thinking about the best solutions with the rest of the team. Passionate about sports, he spends his free time doing them and cooking or getting to know the city of Valencia and its corners.
- Operations Engineer — Javier Gisbert — With an experience of more than 20 years in Mercadona and having started in physical stores, Javi gradually acquired knowledge and experience in the different fields present within the company, allowing him, through internal promotion, to move on to positions of greater responsibility and that has been a personal and professional challenge with which he had been polishing and improving skills within Mercadona, including training for all stores, communication skills, company, and group dynamics, and interpretation of the different Mercadona departments in which he worked. He currently belongs to the division that owns Mercadona’s fresh orders and stock control, and for this reason, he joins with the V6 team developing as the physical owner of the product and serving as a bridge between the Mercadona Online team and Physical Mercadona for this great project. Javi is a very active person, he dedicates his free time to his greatest passion, which is traveling around the world.
- Product Designer — Ruben Menárguez— passionate about illustration, cinema, and technology. Since he was little he studied in different art and drawing academies until he finished his degree in Fine Arts and specialized in graphic design, illustration, and, ultimately, user experience and design of digital products. His professional career began in a startup developing applications and management tools for large sports entities. After this stage, Ruben started a new journey in electronic commerce that allowed him to grow and get more involved with the product teams to improve existing products and new proposals. All this is under the prism of generating the best user experience and, in turn, working in a product culture where all those involved will focus on the business, product, and customer.
- User Experience Researcher — Antonio Montagudo — He helps teams better understand problems that arise, validate prototypes, and implement necessary tests with our Jefe or store managers. With this, Toni gets the team to continue advancing with its objectives. He likes sports, especially soccer and paddle tennis.
- Product Specialist — Noemi Ull — She started as a cashier in a physical store, and then she was lucky enough to start with the new online shopping project as a Picker in the fruit and vegetable section. Thanks to the fact that Mercadona has an internal promotion policy, in 2019, she got offered the opportunity to join the Mercadona Tech team as a Product Specialist. She is responsible for creating training content, whether in video GIFs or other formats, and showing both the tool’s operation and the physical process. The content must be as clear and concise as possible to avoid uncertainty and facilitate the recipients’ work. In 2021 she trained as a Super Mom, which has led her to discover her biggest hobby: multitasking.
- Site Reliability Engineer — Miguel Villar — Currently, he is studying Computer Engineering in his free time. He has been working as a sysadmin for almost eight years. Miguel switched to the SRE role due to his pursuit of reliability and automation. Still, the part of his job that he enjoys the most is helping and getting involved with People, providing the supply team the advice and support needed to achieve the scale and reliability they look for. Miguel is a mechanics freak (which he studied before working in Tech), and he loves everything that has an engine, cars, motorbikes, jet planes…Usually, you can find him spending his free time in the garage, playing video games, scale modeling, or traveling with his motorbike.
- Backend Engineer — Lorena Calabuig — Team Lead, managing the technical aspects of our Supply team. She graduated from Computer Science at the Polytechnic University of Valencia and has a master’s degree in Parallel and Distributed Computing. Lorena is also certified in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology. She was in two research labs while graduating with undergraduate and master’s degrees. After leaving the academic world, Lorena went through a consultancy firm and an electrical marketer until Mercadona Tech found her. She combined work with studies again, earning a diploma in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology. In her spare time, you can see her playing with her pets, watching series, preparing a cake, or trying her strength in arts.
- Android Engineer- Edgar Miró — Mobile Developer, working at Mercadona Tech for almost three years. He is a specialist in Android Development. Edgar is certified in the advanced development of mobile applications in Android given by the Polytechnic University of Valencia. He also completed a course in virtual reality for mobile devices in Unity. Passionate about sports, mainly: diving, trail running, football, and Formula 1. He also likes cooking and baking his bread. With more than 15 years of experience in the software development world, Edgar declares himself an authentic fan of mobile technologies and almost every programming code and clean code in particular.
- Android Engineer — Luis Cencillo — He started learning Android Development in his final year project almost 10 years ago. He has worked in consulting, in a startup, as a freelancer, and, since 2018, in Mercadona Tech. ¨Few projects can impact as many people as our online sales!¨ Luis loves what he does, surrounded by very good people he can learn every day. In Supply, he supports developing the stock control tool and maintaining other apps that we use in Logistics. He enjoys playing basketball in his spare time, although with three daughters, it is increasingly difficult to find a moment, he says.
- Backend Engineer — Juanjo Ponz — He studied computer engineering management until the last year at the UPV. He is passionate about clean architecture and good practices in code. Juanjo has been working at Mercadona Tech as a backend for almost three years.
- Backend Engineer — YOU?
This article was co-authored with Cecilia Ughi, Product Manager of the Supply team. Thank you so much for your valuable insights 😃
