Sainsbury’s: Enterprise Network Transformation

When the Sainsbury’s network became complex to maintain and manage, a joint Sainsbury’s-Accenture team rolled out a network transformation project as an integral part of Sainsbury’s overall IT transformation, resulting in immediate savings of more than UK £35 million (US $50 million) per year.

A joint investigation by a Sainsbury’s-Accenture team found that the management of Sainsbury’s corporate network had become complex and reactive, with unclear service boundaries leading to service overlaps, gaps and quality issues. The existing networks (both LAN and WAN) were based on old technologies and designs from multiple vendors, which limited their scalability and made it even more complex to maintain and manage.

An aggressive new management team at Sainsbury’s targeted network transformation as an important tool to improve overall business performance in the face of falling profits, lower share price and significant competitive threats. One key objective of the transformation initiative was to transform the networking organization into a network services manager, to benefit from economies of scale accessible to telecom carriers.

Accenture worked with Sainsbury’s to establish board-level business relationships with the selected telecom carrier, BT. The joint Accenture-Sainsbury’s team also maintained tight control of the design and implementation. The team then worked on a sweeping enterprise network transformation initiative.

After a successful pilot of the new networking infrastructure, the team proceeded with a wider rollout, with approximately 117 sites migrated in a week. The team migrated 630 sites in total—with no impact on trading at Sainsbury’s stores. The LAN rollout timeline was also synchronized with the deployment of a new point-of-sale platform. The upgrade was performed at the steady rate of 18 stores per week.

The benefits realized by Sainsbury’s because of this initiative have been impressive. The company has already reduced operating costs by 25 percent, while enjoying improved service levels.

By teaming with Accenture, Sainsbury’s has established a more flexible, scalable and manageable network. The company has doubled bandwidth to support re-platforming traffic, and now enjoys flexible bandwidth to its 200 largest stores. This network transformation was an integral part of Sainsbury’s overall IT transformation which included outsourcing all aspects of the food retailer’s information technology infrastructure to Accenture. This strategy resulted in immediate savings of more than UK £35 million (US $50 million) a year.