The journey to public cloud for a global food distributor

A leading global food retailer and distributor began its journey to the public cloud to integrate disparate systems, improve data management, and provide a better customer experience following a series of acquisitions. To accomplish this, the company implemented a master data management platform and migrated a large share of its workloads to a cloud solution built on Amazon Web Services (AWS)—quickly realizing significant benefits, including a 50 percent decrease in cost footprint.

But the company’s initial cloud implementation also revealed some organizational and operational challenges. Employees were not used to working across teams, and manual processes weren’t being automated fast enough to deliver on internal needs because of organizational silos. The company also found that they needed new skills to design, develop, and run cloud-based solutions.

The company realized it needed to shift to an Agile operating model that would enable collaboration between software development and operations teams, including cloud engineers, with an increased focus on automation and self-service. They asked Deloitte to help.

For the company, cloud was a critical enabler of Agile and the move to Agile helped accelerate cloud migration. Now, more than 40 teams are using cloud services as part of their product delivery and employees across the organization have been trained to get the greatest value from the cloud. The average time to create a feature has gone from 50 days to 19 days, including new self-service capabilities by the cloud team and new business capabilities by the product teams. IT is now a trusted partner with the business teams, enabling better business outcomes.