We called it
Just about every commentard predicted this would happen.
Asda's 'self-inflicted' SAP mess after Walmart divorce stalls financial revival
Asda's delayed tech divorce from Walmart, which involved a complete SAP ERP upgrade, has caused "severe disruption" hitting the UK retailer's quarterly revenue. The UK's third-largest supermarket said the tech problems "materially impacted" its third-quarter trading, contributing to a 2.8 percent year-on-year fall in revenue …
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Monday 1st December 2025 13:50 GMT theOtherJT
Availability in stores and online was at an eight-year high of over...
...95 percent.
Ninety five.
How has it come to this? Seriously, how have numbers like this become acceptable? That's a 1 in 20 failure rate. That's shocking... or would be had that not been something I've come to expect these days. Can you imagine putting up with that in any other walk of life? Every three weeks your fridge decides to take a day off and ruins all your milk. One working day a month you just can't get there because your car has decided that this is that one day in twenty where the starter motor is having unscheduled down-time. Every twentieth trip to the shops - oops, sorry, can't sell you anything right now, it's the 5% of the year when the payment processing isn't working.
Why the hell do we put up with IT systems that are so bad?
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Monday 1st December 2025 14:06 GMT theOtherJT
Re: Availability in stores and online was at an eight-year high of over...
"Asda said on Friday that the completion of the system cutover disrupted operations during Q3, particularly the flow of stock between depots and stores, causing inconsistent availability levels across stores and particularly online."
Which they attribute to the failure of their stock management system.
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Monday 1st December 2025 14:56 GMT theOtherJT
Re: Availability in stores and online was at an eight-year high of over...
You know what, I've read it again, and I think you're probably right. They're not claiming that the stock management system was working only 95% of the time, but stock was available 95% of the time.
OK, that's more forgivable. There are definitely other ways that you can end up out of stock - sometimes the start align unexpectedly and everyone decides they want one specific thing on one specific day and there's nothing you can do about it because there was no way to know in advance that you'd need 90% increase over normal stock levels to cover demand that day.
That being said - they're a supermarket. Having things in stock is kinda their purpose, and a 95% hit rate still isn't that great.
Maybe I'm wearing rose tinted specs here, but anecdotally I don't remember going shopping 20 years ago and having to go to three different supermarkets to get my weekly in - something that happens to me quite regularly these days.
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Monday 1st December 2025 15:13 GMT Lazlo Woodbine
Re: Availability in stores and online was at an eight-year high of over...
Asda historically have had a shit stock ordering systems.
I used to work for one of the companies that supplied their cheese.
The marketing department would decide to run a promotion, but not bother telling the ordering team, so then I'd get an urgent order on Friday night to deliver 60 tonnes of sliced chedder by Monday. So I'd have to source and order 60 tonnes of chedder, have it shipped to the slicing plant, sliced, packed and shipped to Asda's Doncaster warehouse in 48 hours. And if it was late, it was my fault, not Asda's marketing team...
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Monday 1st December 2025 17:33 GMT keithpeter
Re: Availability in stores and online was at an eight-year high of over...
@Lazlo Woodbine
I have eaten the efforts of your work over the years (although I am a lump in a pack geezer rather than sliced cheese) so see icon.
Seriously local largeish ASDA seems to have most stuff in usually. There was a serious shortage of cherry pies some months ago but now resolved.
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Monday 1st December 2025 15:04 GMT Filippo
Re: Availability in stores and online was at an eight-year high of over...
This question does not get asked often enough.
I mean, I know the answer, and it is "in most fields of IT, advertising new features attracts more customers than advertising reliable features" whereas if you advertised a car as "has a joystick instead of a steering wheel, but I won't publish numbers on how often the joystick breaks off" you would rightfully go bankrupt.
But then I have to ask why that is the case, and I don't know the answer to that.
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Monday 1st December 2025 15:06 GMT AMBxx
Re: Availability in stores and online was at an eight-year high of over...
95% is pretty poor. I used to be a buyer for a wine wholesaler. I'd have been slaughtered by the sales team with that sort of rate. It was much easier before the cloud though!
That said, I'm sure they have the notion of a 'core' range that must be in stock 100% of the time (milk, bread etc). If they have a wine list of 100 wines and 10 of the expensive wines are out of stock. it really doesn't matter.
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Monday 1st December 2025 20:42 GMT ecofeco
Re: Availability in stores and online was at an eight-year high of over...
Why the hell do we put up with IT systems that are so bad?
The only folks who put up with it are us plebes who have no say.
But the suits are getting VERY generous backhanders, not to mention owning the stock of the vendor. We used to call that, conflict of interest, kickbacks, perks and bribery, but somehow it's perfectly legal these days.
Not even joking. It's all documented if one bothers to look for it.
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Monday 1st December 2025 13:57 GMT wolfetone
They are mortgaged to the hilt. The stores themselves are run down, shit feeling, and not nice places to be. The quality of the food isn't there (markably down actually), and places like Aldi and Lidl are providing nicer environments to shop, better quality of product, for the same money.
Don't blame all of your failings on IT!
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Monday 1st December 2025 14:36 GMT Like a badger
I'd put the blame in one place: Private equity chancers.
They hoped to asset-strip the business, told themselves "supermarkets are just shelf-stackers, how hard can it be?" and relied on a couple of geysers who'd built up a convenience store empire around petrol stations, 'cos that's the same thing innit?
And when they got there, the cupboard was bare of assets to strip, it turned out that running a full line hypermarket was in fact bloody difficult, and the convenience store geysers had no answers, wanted to keep on buying petrol stations, and fell out with each other. Last time I was in Morrisons it didn't seem much better than Asda, for broadly the same private equity reason.
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Tuesday 2nd December 2025 19:57 GMT David Hicklin
Lidl has become our first choice these days as the store experience is much nicer - they are open spaced enough not to feel like a warehouse that is Asda/Tesco. Sainsbury's feels really old, dated and almost claustrophobic these days and my experience of our local Aldi is not much better.
The children just love the child sized shopping trolleys at Lidl.
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Monday 1st December 2025 15:16 GMT Anonymous Coward
Scan and Go functionality failure
In the 2nd largest of our local Asda at the weekend.
Paper note posted at the Scan and Shop/Go scanner collection point.
"Due to an ongoing issue please do not delete an item from the handset once it has been scanned. As doing so may cause the device to reboot"
Brilliant.
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Tuesday 2nd December 2025 08:52 GMT Lee D
Sigh
£430,000,000
There are 1,115 ASDA stores in the UK.
That's £385,650 per store, thus far.
You could have literally just gone to any other provider and said "Hey, give me a new system" for that price, and put on-prem servers in literally every store and rebought every POS system in every store in the country.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
