PROMOTE POWER PROTECT Tesco.com Delivers the Goods with Autonomy Content Management Founded in 1924 by Sir Jack Cohen who sold groceries in London’s East End markets, Tesco is today the largest retailer in the UK with more than 800 stores in eight countries staffed by over 200,000 employees. Unlike the many notable dotcom failures of the late 1990s, business is booming for the online retail giant, which has seen sales during last two years skyrocket. Today, the company reaches 95 percent of the UK population, providing items to an estimated 4,000 customers per day. There are two key reasons for Tesco’s continued success. First is its tremendous market penetration in the U.K. (over 95 percent) and European market, giving it the unique ability to leverage its “brick and mortar” stores as grocery “warehouses.” The second important factor is Tesco’s commitment to providing customers with the same quality of experience online that made them loyal customers at Tesco’s physical stores. When the Tesco grocery site was first launched, it was limited in scope, and therefore its content was easily managed internally. However, as Tesco.com grew in popularity, the company quickly recognized it lacked a scalable infrastructure and efficient process to manage the massive amount of content it envisioned it would be presenting to customers. During this initial period, the process of creating and posting content to Tesco’s website was extremely time and labor intensive. At this time, Tesco relied on external agencies to develop content for Tesco.com employees, who then reviewed and manually copied the completed pages to staging and production servers. Recalls Leon Stoner, web operations manager at Tesco, “We used to have a lot of phone calls and e-mails going back and forth. We felt that a content management system could enable us to work more efficiently with those agencies, instead of e-mailing stuff between us or sending floppy disks or zip drives in the post, which is what we were doing,” adds Stoner.“ Just to release one page could take hours!” A Platform for Rapid Growth and Constant Innovation With competitors at its heels, Tesco sought a content management system that would provide the necessary agility to enable Tesco to introduce new products and launch new stores. “We knew we were going to be expanding rapidly. We could not afford to take six to 12 months to build any one of our projects or we would risk falling behind the competition. We needed to build an operation that was scalable.” In 1999, Tesco turned to Autonomy because it offered the only cost effective platform that could meet Tesco’s demand for massive parallel development as well as rapid and frequent publishing of content. The UK’s Leading Grocery Retailer and First to Offer Internet-based Home Shopping in the UK Autonomy also helped Tesco successfully execute the expansion of its online offering beyond groceries. Now the online store boasts 14 major product areas, which include books, CDs, wine, fashion, baby products, and online banking—far more products than it could ever have offered in its brick and mortar stores. Its entertainment section, for example, includes over 1.2 million books plus every single CD, video, DVD, and computer on UK release. All of this expansion has ultimately resulted in significantly higher sales for the company. Being able to build and manage all of its online content within the Autonomy system has been key to Tesco’s continued success. “Tesco likes to keep ahead of the game. We like to roll things out very, very quickly and Autonomy has enabled us to do that. As a result, we now feel that we’re at least two years ahead of the competition,” emphasizes Stoner. Case Study Customer The UK’s leading grocery retailer and first to offer Internet-based home shopping in the UK. Industry Retail Implementation Highlights • Accelerate time-to-impact for multiple online stores in parallel • Enable business owners with tools to keep site content current • Automated application deployment for improved speed and IT effectiveness Benefits of Using Autonomy • Enabled rapid rollout of 15 web properties in 18 months, with an estimated 2 year lead time over competition • Reduced costs by 80% through a streamlined content production process • Automated deployment saves Tesco an estimated $150,000 annually and reduced time by 85% “Autonomy has allowed us to maintain our first to market lead in Internet-based home shopping by enabling a rapid pace of innovation, keeping us about two years ahead of any of our competitors.” — Leon Stoner, web operations manager, Tesco
Transcript
PROMOTEPOWER
PROTECT
Tesco.com Delivers the Goods with Autonomy Content Management
Founded in 1924 by Sir Jack Cohen who sold groceries in London’s East End markets, Tesco is today the largest retailer in the UK with more than 800 stores in eight countries staffed by over 200,000 employees. Unlike the many notable dotcom failures of the late 1990s, business is booming for the online retail giant, which has seen sales during last two years skyrocket. Today, the company reaches 95 percent of the UK population, providing items to an estimated 4,000 customers per day. There are two key reasons for Tesco’s continued success. First is its tremendous market penetration in the U.K. (over 95 percent) and European market, giving it the unique ability to leverage its “brick and mortar” stores as grocery “warehouses.” The second important factor is Tesco’s commitment to providing customers with the same quality of experience online that made them loyal customers at Tesco’s physical stores.
When the Tesco grocery site was first launched, it was limited in scope, and therefore its content was easily managed internally. However, as Tesco.com grew in popularity, the company quickly recognized it lacked a scalable infrastructure and efficient process to manage the massive amount of content it envisioned it would be presenting to customers.
During this initial period, the process of creating and posting content to Tesco’s website was extremely time and labor intensive. At this time, Tesco relied on external agencies to develop content for Tesco.com employees, who then reviewed and manually copied the completed pages to staging and production servers. Recalls Leon Stoner, web operations manager at Tesco, “We used to have a lot of phone calls and e-mails going back and forth. We felt that a content management system could enable us to work more efficiently with those agencies, instead of e-mailing stuff between us or sending floppy disks or zip drives in the post, which is what we were doing,” adds Stoner.“ Just to release one page could take hours!”
A Platform for Rapid Growth and Constant Innovation With competitors at its heels, Tesco sought a content management system that would provide the necessary agility to enable Tesco to introduce new products and launch new stores. “We knew we were going to be expanding rapidly. We could not afford to take six to 12 months to build any one of our projects or we would risk falling behind the competition. We needed to build an operation that was scalable.” In 1999, Tesco turned to Autonomy because it offered the only cost effective platform that could meet Tesco’s demand for massive parallel development as well as rapid and frequent publishing of content.
The UK’s Leading Grocery Retailer and First to Offer Internet-based Home Shopping in the UKAutonomy also helped Tesco successfully execute the expansion of its online offering beyond groceries. Now the online store boasts 14 major product areas, which include books, CDs, wine, fashion, baby products, and online banking—far more products than it could ever have offered in its brick and mortar stores. Its entertainment section, for example, includes over 1.2 million books plus every single CD, video, DVD, and computer on UK release. All of this expansion has ultimately resulted in significantly higher sales for the company. Being able to build and manage all of its online content within the Autonomy system has been key to Tesco’s continued success. “Tesco likes to keep ahead of the game. We like to roll things out very, very quickly and Autonomy has enabled us to do that. As a result, we now feel that we’re at least two years ahead of the competition,” emphasizes Stoner.
Case Study
CustomerThe UK’s leading grocery retailer and first to offer Internet-based home shopping in the UK.
“Autonomy has allowed us to maintain our first to market lead in Internet-based home shopping by enabling a rapid pace of innovation, keeping us about two years ahead of any of our competitors.”— Leon Stoner, web operations manager, Tesco
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Content Management Helps Tesco Respond Quicker, Save MoneyWith thousands of customers accessing Tesco.com every hour, it is critical that the retailer have the ability to instantly post product information. Now, as soon as competitors’ prices change, Tesco can immediately respond. “Our customers do their day-to-day shopping online and seven out of ten top selling lines are fresh food. This requires a system that enables our employees to update the site regularly and quickly. Autonomy has the user-friendly architecture and the ease of use that we needed,” notes Stoner. “Ultimately, we are giving our people the power to serve our customers directly without having to rely on a big, internal team of HTML authors and programmers.”
Now that it no longer relies on outside vendors to make routine changes to its sites, Tesco has been able to minimize development costs. “Where we used to spend tens of thousands of pounds on our agencies per month, we’ve reduced that cost to a couple of thousand pounds ...that’s a magnitude of nearly 80 percent.” Another major source of time and cost savings has been realized through Tesco’s ability to automate the content distribution process, saving the retailer an estimated $150,000 a year.
Dynamic Site Draws Two and a Half Million Visitors to Tesco.comA large proportion of Tesco’s success can be attributed to the quality, diversity, and timeliness of the content that Tesco posts. With the help of Autonomy, Tesco can now provide shoppers with a personalized shopping experience that is both easy to navigate and enticing, providing them with new, special offers each week. “On Tesco.com, we pride ourselves in our customer offer —Autonomy helps us keep our site “alive” with products information and editorial that customers are really interested in, including special offers across the whole site,” says Stoner. “We believe this makes our customers’ experience much more enjoyable and keeps them coming back again and again.”
Tesco’s online investment has clearly paid off. Since launching Tesco.com, sales for the Internet-based retailer have exploded from £52 million in 2000 to £356 million in 2002. In December 2002, despite a soft economy, Tesco.com grocery sales reached an all-time high of £10 million per week for the first time ever. The accelerated and cost effective development cycle enabled through Autonomy has also been instrumental in helping Tesco manage its global expansion to Ireland, the United States, and soon South Korea. Looking ahead, Autonomy will continue to play an instrumental role in sustaining and expanding Tesco’s established leadership position in the online retail market.
About AutonomyAutonomy, an HP Company, is a global leader in software that processes human information, or unstructured data, including social media, email, video, audio, text and web pages, etc. Autonomy's powerful management and analytic tools for structured information together with its ability to extract meaning in real time from all forms of information, regardless of format, is a unique tool for companies seeking to get the most out of their data. Autonomy's product portfolio helps power companies through enterprise search analytics, business process management and OEM operations. Autonomy also offers information governance solutions in areas such as eDiscovery, content management and compliance, as well as marketing solutions that help companies grow revenue, such as web content management, online marketing optimization and rich media management.
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