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I'm going to have to disagree -- and this is based on first hand knowledge (albeit from a few years ago), and from second-hand knowledge from friends that I tru

by imroot 8y ago

I'm going to have to disagree -- and this is based on first hand knowledge (albeit from a few years ago), and from second-hand knowledge from friends that I trust who are working in/around Kroger now. Kroger is in a difficult position -- Grocery is a low-margin space: it is the true "race to the bottom," and now, with Amazon's acquisition of Whole Foods, and Target's acquisition of shipt (Kroger has looked at other delivery services, but, can't find one for the same price point), they're struggling to find the same portfolio matrix to keep them competitive to other startups. They want to use GCE, but, they're truly struggling to use it. They refuse to use AWS for competitive reasons. They don't want to pay for talent (they were offering an Enterprise Architect $25/hour on a contract in the Cincinnati area , they don't want to pay for commercial tooling). Admittedly, in order for them to make money, they have to run truly Lean IT...but, they also make really foolish decisions. They were considering building their own cloud until it was pointed out just the sheer amount of capex needed for that project....and then the VMWare Licensing costs. They spend a crazy amount of money on SurePOS, but, then don't pay for any of the Verifone branding/customization/contactless enablement for their terminals. Technologies like LaneHawk help their cashiers catch shrink, but, their cashiers comment that it's ineffective and do not work 95% of the time. If it was my job to move Kroger's technology forward, I'd probably do the following: * Look at ways to help the cashiers do their job better and more effectively. Finding ways to shave transaction time will add up, enabling more customers per hour to flow through the transaction lines. * Microservices in the store level for things that need to have store level availability, but, push things to cloud services where it's feasible. Yes -- let's buy bigger pipes to the cloud, but, keep a smaller server at the store in case things fail. We can manage that farm in the cloud more efficiently at scale, and then deploy out to the stores nightly or weekly versus continuous delivery in the cloud. * Vendor Selection: Use the right vendors for the right things. Look at how you're spending your money with your vendors, and do a double check to make sure you're not being foolish with your spending (ala, vendors like Pomeory -- 99.99% of the time, you can do it better in house)

tedmiston 8y ago
I think Kroger is the Amazon of the grocery space. Even with several attempts, Amazon hasn't been able to change that so far. Too many grocery items are expensive/heavy to ship. I'm in Cincinnati (Kroger HQ) and Amazon is trying extra hard here with special pilots. > Kroger has looked at other delivery services, but, can't find one for the same price point They are already using Instacart in the US and Ocado in the UK. > They want to use GCE, but, they're truly struggling to use it. This is outdated info. Their GCP partnership was publicly announced ~6 months ago.
nickpsecurity 8y ago
I can tell you worked with them, too. I think you were only scratching the surface, though. Most of the stores I see run on some mainframe apps or something that people use terminals for on buggy handhelds. The checklanes got upgraded recently to what looks like a Fujitsu Linux running Java-based clients. Slow and limited in UI control compared to the concurrent DOS thing from IBM that only slowed down on updates. They had no interest in stuff like QNX when I proposed it for U-Scan to keep robots running despite software failures which they have a lot of. Employees complain the browsers in that company can take several minutes to ten minutes to load on whatever thin client and virtualization solutions they're using. They didn't know. The inventory and Clicklist computers often have different inventory in them or other preventable problems. The digital coupon system constantly screws up to the point that a recent sale required printed barcodes for cashiers at registers in case it screwed up again. They apparently have a social network that few workers use for knowledge sharing since they don't even have time to stock stuff. The list goes on and on. I keep following the situation out of both concern and morbid curiosity. Easily one of the worst I've seen at managing both operations and IT. Their media and legal departments are among the better I've seen, though. I mean, nobody reports this stuff. Can't be an accident with the amount of attention on them.

by imroot 8y ago

tedmiston 8y ago

I think Kroger is the Amazon of the grocery space. Even with several attempts, Amazon hasn't been able to change that so far. Too many grocery items are expensive/heavy to ship. I'm in Cincinnati (Kroger HQ) and Amazon is trying extra hard here with special pilots. > Kroger has looked at other delivery services, but, can't find one for the same price point They are already using Instacart in the US and Ocado in the UK. > They want to use GCE, but, they're truly struggling to use it. This is outdated info. Their GCP partnership was publicly announced ~6 months ago.

nickpsecurity 8y ago

I can tell you worked with them, too. I think you were only scratching the surface, though. Most of the stores I see run on some mainframe apps or something that people use terminals for on buggy handhelds. The checklanes got upgraded recently to what looks like a Fujitsu Linux running Java-based clients. Slow and limited in UI control compared to the concurrent DOS thing from IBM that only slowed down on updates. They had no interest in stuff like QNX when I proposed it for U-Scan to keep robots running despite software failures which they have a lot of. Employees complain the browsers in that company can take several minutes to ten minutes to load on whatever thin client and virtualization solutions they're using. They didn't know. The inventory and Clicklist computers often have different inventory in them or other preventable problems. The digital coupon system constantly screws up to the point that a recent sale required printed barcodes for cashiers at registers in case it screwed up again. They apparently have a social network that few workers use for knowledge sharing since they don't even have time to stock stuff. The list goes on and on. I keep following the situation out of both concern and morbid curiosity. Easily one of the worst I've seen at managing both operations and IT. Their media and legal departments are among the better I've seen, though. I mean, nobody reports this stuff. Can't be an accident with the amount of attention on them.