Tesco Technology.
What is Tesco Technology all about
ln Budapest, our Technology hub employs highly trained software engineers and managers who are implementing global software development projects across fulfilment, supplier and product management, online and in-store loss prevention, and our online grocery sites.
A welcome message from our CTO, Guus Dekkers
Hello, and a warm welcome to Tesco Technology!
Tesco Technology has massively evolved during the last few years towards a truly product driven, lean, DevOps organisation and today unites all necessary capabilities, making Tesco one of the leading retailers worldwide.
When new people join Tesco Technology, they are often surprised by three elements: the sheer size of our operations, our commitment to building our own solutions and the possibilities for individuals to evolve and develop. 1 am convinced that you will quickly be as excited on many of these elements as most of your colleagues are!
lt is an exciting time to join Tesco Business Solutions and Technology. Our work is not only about helping customers, colleagues and shareholders but is also about helping to make the world a better place. I would encourage you to familiarise yourself over the next few weeks and months with the great achievements and opportunities this organisation brings to all of us.
Tesco is a great place to learn and grow, with great colleagues, splendid values and a very bright future actively responding and anticipating the digital changes ahead of us.
Congratulations for joining a great business, good luck and welcome to the team.
Our approach to software development.
Our goal is to bring significant changes to the market by using the latest technologies. We are focusing on a large variety of modern technologies from the backend space and frontend to UX, UI and even data science and engineering.
We are aiming to drive business value through innovation and to create an organization that fundamentally transforms the retail environment.
We put accountability and ownership on the individuals and their teams in order to run a horizontal organization where teamwork is extremely important. Within an end-to-end approach we offer our colleague opportunities for self-development and career growth.
Loss Prevention
The Loss Prevention Team’s goal is to prevent stealing and fraud online and in the stores. lt is about recognizing fraud patterns from our data and implementing it into our API to avoid them real time. ln the stores, our services are deployed to 10000 Tills to date where we use scales and computer vision to determine fraudulent activities in-act. Having a centralised system, we can combine these different technologies with our machine learning capabilities to reduce loss across the business.
We also work on continuously decreasing customer friction. You can see our work when you go through a “Scan As You Shop” journey or when you enter one of our newest checkout-free stores called “GetGo”.
Retail Platform
Observability Platform
Real time monitoring and handling of 70000+ devices and providing nearly real-time visualizations and alerts.
Deployment Platform
Creating Tesco Till improvements which might be the unique in the whole retail industry and leaving behind old platforms that are not capable of control the deployments, the network utilization and traffic control at the same time. We have already successfully managed a rollout in store pipeline which is a big benefit so far.
Store Device Mesh
ln addition, introducing the tool of Service Mesh to store platforms is a unique step in the market.
Commercial, Trade & Execute
MyProduct: Cost & CostAPI
An application where agreement far cost prices between ‘buyer’ and ‘supplier’ are managed. The application removes the need to manage price changes in Excel sheets and will provide Buyers with the tool to make data-based decisions to set a cost in a consistent, competitive, and process compliant fashion. The centralized platform provides easy access and visibility of current and historical cost pricing.
MyProduct: Fuel
An application to calculate fuel costs and prices and volume forecasts.
Before information were gathered manually and calculated through Excel sheets. With this system we can have shared responsibility, auditability, and make processes less error prone, and comfortable.
MyProduct: Deals
An application to manage the Fixed deals and charges with suppliers.
With the help of the application, it is easier to capture all the deals and the financial dropouts are significantly reduced. This system will replace a leading industry standard (several Oracle products), as they lead to an unmaintainable system.
Finance
Trading Partner lncome API (TPI)
This solution solves Tesco’s own problems with its Commercial lncome recognition processes. We are building custom software – a solution that has many unique components, tailored to integrate all the necessary systems and implement both tactical and strategic approaches to consolidate, calculate and invoice Commercial lncome from our suppliers.
Finance: Stock Valuation Service (STVS)
Goods-for-Resale (GFR) Stock Valuation is pivotal system in every business to operate.
Such systems provide the visibility to business to profit margins, Cost of Goods sold, Cost of Goods Available far Sale, Stock loss and all the other parameters in monetarv valuation to establish Financial accounting on General Ledger (GL). Tesco currentlv ooerates with 5 different stock valuation legacv svstems with different accounting cost flow assumptions. Our goal is to build a unified platform to tackle this functionality.
Online: Site Optimisation, Project and Programme
We are continuously implementing new features for Tesco to be more competitive with the existing market. Such as projects like Premium Pricing, Same day Delivery, Express Delivery or Delivery Saver.
We also create new ways of interaction on listing pages that relies less on filtering, and more on visual exploration. lt gives us the possibility to categorize products along new dimensions in a cost-efficient way, allowing testing new ideas without having to invest into updating product data structures, which is very costly and lacks flexibility.
Price API: Price / Promotions Setup
Team works on a set of enterprise APls to solve the problem of being able to setup prices, promotions and clearances for any products, stores in way that all changes are compliant with legal and business rules.
Tesco has a set of legacy applications responsible for similar functionality, but new APls provide much more flexibility and faster and simpler end to end execution model for changes. The APls are currently used for all stores and online in the UK and ROI for almost all products.
Other than the setup sub-domain pricing has an execution sub-domain as well, which is responsible for calculating the basket prices based on the base price of the purchased products and the applicable promotions, but this functionality is not covered by the setup API teams.
One checkout
The One checkout team is working on extracting the checkout journey from the Lego application into a separate microsite for UK, ROI and possibly CE in the future. During the development we are also improving the design, performance as well as doing A/B tests to see if we can improve the user experience too. We are also involved in the development of the brand-new Marketplace feature, which will enable users to do their shopping with 3rd party vendors, but on Tesco’s platform, giving them a seamless shopping experience.