Hangover from messy Walmart tech divorce ongoing at Asda

The UK's third-largest grocery retailer continues to see its IT operations beset with problems as it struggles with its fraught divorce from US retail giant Walmart. In the last couple of weeks, Asda has been hit by errors and outages affecting online clothing orders, self-scanning technology, and the app used by staff store …

[Irongut]

> The move also includes the transfer of around 100 tech team members to Indian outsourcing company TCS. A collective consultation for a staff transfer under TUPE – an arrangement by which employment rights are protected under UK law – has begun with the transfer of staff expected in September.

So expect a complete meltdown some time in September with Asda unable to operate and (hopefully) the closing of all their supermarkets by the end of the year. Sounds awesome, I can't wait.

[tiggity]

Given the penny pinching and how badly they treat their shop floor staff (assuming people I know who used to work there* are representative & its not changed in the last few months) I'm not in the least bit surprised the IT changeover is going badly.

have since

* all left to find less awful employers

[GoneFission]

I don't think the historical record of retailers treating their floor-level employees awfully has been sullied by the existence of a company that tries to do right by their people.

[MyffyW]

Stock situation in our local ASDA is ridiculous - hard to hold onto market share when you don't have stuff to market.

Shame, because I used to prefer ASDA to the other big supermarkets, not least because of pricing and availability.

[MachDiamond]

"Stock situation in our local ASDA is ridiculous - hard to hold onto market share when you don't have stuff to market."

I'm in a pretty small town that's primarily serviced by two "dollar" stores that have some groceries with more aisles of cheap Chinese tat and one independent market whose stock is oriented primarily towards one ethnic group and their prices are rather high for most things. The frustrating thing is the planning on what to carry is woefully incomplete when there is product on the shelves. I've talked to a manager at the Dollar General whom I've known for years and her hands are tied. The head office stocks what they want to and sends what they send. It really got bad due to things being in short supply during lockdowns. I think some of their algorithms got hammered by showing zero sales for things without realizing that having zero inventory will lead to that. Many of my favorite items have never come back. There's also a big skew towards ready meals over ingredients one would want for cooking from scratch. While they sometimes have AP flour on hand, they don't stock yeast. The spice selection is usually depleted and there won't be something as common as cinnamon (expensive bottles) for weeks. I've been increasing my stocks of many things and picking up proper storage containers to keep things sealed and usable that I buy in quantity from the large warehouse grocery 45 miles down the road. I need to redo the solar installation for the chest freezer as I've bought a newer one that I can fit in the house. The one I had was too big and I had it in the garage. I'm a tenner up on the swap.

[Anonymous Coward]

My thoughts exactly. I feel sorry for the team in Leeds as they have been cut to the bone by the Issa brother's mismanagement and lack of investment since buying them out of Walmart.

When you see 'Outsourcing to TCS' it never ends well. I worked at a large mobile phone company that used TCS to run their data centres. To say they were shambolic would be an understatement. But the decision was made by the international overlords who had no idea what was actually happening in the business as they had rose-tinted powerpoints 'massaged' to look good by the local management team.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is what happens when your top bosses bring only convenience store and forecourt expertise to a large format national-footprint supermarket with turnover of around £20 billion. I'm sure that hubris persuaded the Issa brothers they were up to the job, the question I have is what TDR Capital were smoking when they put the money up for this misbegotten venture?

And for all of us a more worrying thought, who are TDR's shareholders? Apparently a third of their money comes pension funds, so that's not good.

[Missing Semicolon]

They are doing what PE does best

Failing as cheaply as possible so that the assets (the land the shops are on) can be sold off for housebuilding.

[tin 2]

This is pretty much the same business and world over. Amazes me that the overlords get so out of touch.

[shawn.grinter]

Mental

So mid migration the TUPE critical staff, Silly Billies, what could possibly go wrong……

[Pascal Monett]

"The overwhelming majority of these were completed successfully"

The overwhelming majority.

So let's imagine 99%.

That leaves 1% of 9.6 million which, if my maths is right, means a whopping 9600 cases where things went wrong.

Now, I understand that, in this day and age . . . wait a minute, what the fuck am I saying ? You had computers convert something to something else and you couldn't be arsed to do that reliably across 100% of your customer history ?

WHAT THE FUCK ARE COMPUTERS FOR ?!?

If you need a proper programmer to do things right, call me . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

computers are for looking with-the-times and modern

Most of the "going digital" is driven by FOMO and ends up being less than entirely properly useful. Especially the corner cases. Quite amazing how readily non-conformers are relegated to the wayside for quick programme convenience. We know this, in fact everybody can see this happens, and it's widely accepted.

[doublelayer]

Re: "The overwhelming majority of these were completed successfully"

It would be 96,000 and that kind of thing happens all the time when converting records. It would be 100% if there were no weird corner cases, but there are always corner cases when you've relied on something for long enough. Something weird got read off a piece of paper, typed in wrong, automatically imported incorrectly when two databases got merged, is valid under the schema but the schema couldn't represent something important so someone made up a representation for it, extra data was added in a spreadsheet and that got imported into a database which was able to process all the records but they had been mangled by the spreadsheet, or many other things. Ideally, that would not happen. In most large systems, it ends up happening at least sometimes. You don't need pervasive incompetence to achieve that, just that at some point in the many years the systems have existed, someone preferred speed to quality. I'm sure we've all seen that happen before.

[tin 2]

Re: "The overwhelming majority of these were completed successfully"

....and your system does a test run, and punts any anomalies to a meatbag for resolution.... once you do that THEN you migrate the data... Right?

[Anonymous Coward]

2,500 systems?

2,500? This is what happens when departments/business units are left to their own devices to procure software, rather than having a centralised procurement and systems strategy. Absolutely nuts.

[Don Bannister]

Re: 2,500 systems?

I thought that too, but wondered if it actually meant 2,500 devices ....

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: 2,500 systems?

Yeah I did wonder that too before I posted, but there are over 1000 Asda stores in the UK, so it definitely has to be "systems" rather than devices, unless they are only talking about servers. But then, 2,500 servers seems like far too many.

[Tim99]

Re: 2,500 systems?

"... 2,500 servers seems like far too many." Unless the senior IT staff like Windows?

Troll hat off for a moment. When I came back from extended leave from a not-for-profit, their preferred contractor had installed a PDC, SQL Server, Exchange Server, File Server, and a Backup Server for <10 staff. The excuse was to allow for growth - Unfortunately, to bung up their margins, they had cut down on disk space to be within the (extortionate) budget so nothing worked properly. At the time a single MS Small Business Server would have been more that adequate.

[Triggerfish]

Re: 2,500 systems?

Decent sized store.

Rack A, maybe 4 or 5 42-47 U racks that are filled. Some SAP servers (plus redundancy backups), various other servers for things like muzac, ads, loss prevention systems, CC, IOT stuff etc. Shitload of switches. Rack B checkout switches (all doubled up for redundancy), couple more racks dotted round the store mainly switch racks again (also doubled up) for other checkouts, scales, AP, stuff like that.

It adds up.

I've worked with ASDA when they were Walmart owned. Walmart's actual IT infrastructure is huge they also had some highly skilled network engineers etc there. They took their IT infrastructure very seriously as down time was measured in tens of thousands of dollars per hr at large stores. God forbid you needed to do work at a store during certain seasons - it would only have been mission critical stuff like a dead switch, the managers would be actively hostile to people trying to do the work at this period (whereas they usually were accommodating for the most part) and the change controls to do the work got bumped up several layers of management for review.

The IT overhead for a large supermarket chain is actually pretty big, LIDL have recently started selling their services as a datacentre - they probably didn't need to scale the teams, skills. or hardware up much.

[MachDiamond]

Re: 2,500 systems?

"I thought that too, but wondered if it actually meant 2,500 devices ...."

From the problems that have cropped up for places like Tesco and retailers everywhere, stores should be able to 'island' for a period of time if connections drop. Not possible for digital payments, but if the tills don't work, might as well lock the doors and turn off the lights.

[MyffyW]

Migration to S/4 HANA

For when you want to make a business nightmare a technical nightmare too. In someone's mind you can imagine them saying "well since we're doing a migration, now would be a really good time to..."

[Sam not the Viking]

Getting away from it all

In the early days of our company, 1990s, the commercial and technical (Engineering) systems ran on a common system. We make bespoke, high-value products for the utilities. I had written the commercial system based on a simple database and it was devastatingly quick because there were few bells and whistles behind the user-chosen interface (which could be fancy or command-line according to user preference). In particular, product-pricing was simple and the Sales team could look up previous prices, make adjustments for inflation/materials/odd-balls etc. and work up a convincing cost for tendering; it was often years before orders were placed but the quotes could be kept, modified but most important, kept relevant.

We were taken over, largely for our sub-contract ordering. About 80% of our turnover was bought-in, (e.g. motors, controls, metalwork etc.), complimentary products and machinery for auxiliaries around our product. Our new masters enforced their <Big Supplier> 'System' on us which, inexplicably, could not absorb our existing data. Because our 'old' system was small, we managed to keep it under the radar and enable Sales to maintain their pricing policy and history. After five years, I was made redundant but the system was still being used to cost new business.

After several more years and with the company in new and even newer owners, I was tempted back to work there again only to find that the 'old' system was still being used by Sales as they had 'no other way' to keep track of real costs. We were in the process of updating when we had a new boss imposed who introduced a system of his choice. It wasn't bad but he was very proprietorial about it and we weren't allowed to comment, criticise or extract data except through him. I couldn't work with him so I left.

After 18 months he too was gone leaving his system to be abandoned. I don't know if the 'old' system is still there...

[Jamie Jones]

Clairvoyant commentards

When El'Reg broke the story about this migration, I think every commentard confidently predicted it would be a disaster (and this wasn't off-the-cuff cynicism, but a prediction based on their proposed plans)

So, no-one here is surrpised.

While here, I've just got to barf over this comment:

"As part of building a bigger and better Asda, we are delivering Europe's largest IT transformation, involving the separation and upgrade of over 2,500 systems from Walmart," the spokesperson told The Register.

*sigh* Why do they do this?

Reminds me of >> this guy <<

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Clairvoyant commentards

As part of building a bigger and better Asda, we are delivering fucking up Europe's largest IT transformation...

[Fruit and Nutcase]

Re: Clairvoyant commentards

Definitely an ASDA having to service a bigger debt that wasn't there before.

[ComicalEngineer]

Typical of a company being absorbed by a bigger company with borrowed capital and then being divested later.

From Wiki:

In February 2021, the Issa brothers and TDR Capital acquired Asda, with Walmart retaining "an equity investment" in Asda, a seat on the board and "an ongoing commercial relationship".[13] The deal came after an acquisition by Sainsbury's was rejected by the Competition and Markets Authority. As of June 2024, the company is majority owned by TDR Capital following the sale of Zuber Issa's 22.5 per cent holding to the company.

Asda have history here as they massively overpaid for Gateway supermarkets in the 90s and nearly went under then. there was a massive round of cost cutting then, which coincided with me buying there.

The Issa brothers was a massively leveraged buy out which left the company with a debt pile and causing a culture of cost cutting and general penny pinching. Our local Asda has no staff on the manned tills until after 10am and even then only one or two. I go in only when absolutely necessary.

Colour me shocked that they are going for cheapest option IT provider. I'm sure that the quality of the technology will *improve* markedly. [Not]

[Richard 12]

Leveraged buyouts should be illegal

Buying a company and loading all that debt on the company you just bought is just insane - there's really no reason it should be possible to buy a company using its own money.

It has never gone well for the employees or customers.

[MJI]

ASDA

Bought by chancers, so stuff them, there are multiple other supermarkets.

[MachDiamond]

Re: ASDA

"Bought by chancers, so stuff them, there are multiple other supermarkets."

There's a nice big employee owned co-op supermarket that I shop at most of the time with an awesome selection and very good prices. I was there the other day and thought to pick up some Mason jar lids and it appears they are blowing out one brand they have at $0.51/pack. At first I thought I'd get ten, gave myself a big kick up the ass and bought everything they had. I've got a trip on Saturday on the train and figured on seeing if they have another store on the way to the station I can check for the same deal. The normal price is about 5x.

Never write off the corner shop. Most of the time they have crazy high prices, but the owner of the one near me can get really great deals from the wholesale outlets from time to time. He knows I'm big on snacks, so he'll pick up a case of something on offer due to a rapidly approaching or just past best by date and hold some out for me. He once got a deal on some wheat crackers that were a test run for a major brand that they decided not to keep making. I thought they were great and even better for being $8/case vs. what might have been $24-$36 originally. He also keeps Guinness in stock for me. Everybody else in the area must be afraid of the dark.

[Anonymous Coward]

Response

Nice to see the response about ownership and new staff. Nothing to refute that it’s a total disaster…

[PeterM42]

Ah!

So THAT's why their petrol is not always the cheapest now.

[Tron]

Meanwhile, in the 1980s.

Things worked without spending a tonne of cash on this sort of stuff.

It's not really 'progress' if it costs more and doesn't work.

[Badbob]

So farewell then ASDA

I confidently predict a failing of ASDA as a going concern at some point in the near future, and a swallowing up by a foreign owner. It has all the hallmarks of Homebase, which is also on the verge of inhaling its dying breaths.

Maybe a fire sale of stores to competitors might be in the offing. I can name a couple of towns where ASDA has no competition, so could probably offload the stores without attracting CMA concern.

In at least one of those towns, prices were always notably higher than another ASDA store a few miles away that did have competitors. Let’s not even get into the ridiculous pricing of their convenience stores, that make the Co-op look like Aldi.

I was in an ASDA in West Lothian a few days (mid afternoon) ago for a box of cereal, and the shelves were bare. It reminded me of my old local Kwik Save in Bristol just before they went under.

Never a supermarket I liked, I still hate to see a UK company go down because of ineptitude. The staff working to keep the place running deserve far better.

[MJI]

Re: So farewell then ASDA

They were good in the 80s or 90s when they first went national

[Fruit and Nutcase]

Lawyers

I guess until now, there's been no call for "divorce" lawyers - only, after that, they will be trousering feeds from both sides