Learn How Les Mousquetaires is Leading the Way in Benefiting from “Event-Driven Retail”

With nearly 4,000 sales outlets and €46 billion in sales in 2020, Les Mousquetaires is one of the leading distributors in Europe, and 3^rd biggest in France. They’ve also become an excellent example of how we help retailers become truly real-time, by improving the efficiency of their supply chain and offering customers an excellent omni-channel shopping experience through the power of event-driven architecture.

I say that because for a couple years now Les Mousquetaires has been successfully using Solace PubSub+ to build a new digital foundation that streamlines their supply chain and improves their customers’ shopping experience across brick-and-mortar and e-commerce channels.

Two of the key decision makers and leaders responsible for this strategic project – Yannick Brahy, Les Mousquetaires’ chief enterprise architect, and Christophe Gorgeot, head of application development – recently sat down to talk about what they set out to do, and how their strategy has worked out. Charles Chiche, who owns and operates one of Les Mousquetaires Intermarche supermarkets, shared his perspective on the benefits he’s seen on the store floor, and what he looks forward to as they strive to offer customers an unparalleled shopping experience.

I hope you’ll watch the video for yourself, but I’ve tried to capture the most important points below.

The Mission

The video opens with Brahy explaining that in 2018 Les Mousquetaires launched a vast digital transformation plan designed to enable “More real-time, more events, more security, and more event-driven integration with ERP system and other software.”

Gorgeot dives a little deeper by describing how they decided to implement a hybrid integration platform to achieve this objective, and first selected three building blocks to meet the unique challenges they faced:

• An API solution from Axway
• Boomi as their integration platform as a service (iPaaS) provider
• Go Anywhere for managed file transfer

He then says they selected Solace PubSub+ Event Broker to tie those solutions together based on its high performance, ease of deployment, and support for open standards.

“The value of an event broker,” he says, “is that it lets us offer more innovative services to customers and employees through the efficient propagation of real-time data across our enterprise.”

Chiche, who owns one of their many Intermarche stores, explains the need for all of this transformation from his perspective:

“To satisfy and retain our customers, we must exceed their shopping expectations by offering them an ideal shopping experience. This requires operational excellence across our supply chain. That’s why we have undertaken a major program to redesign our commercial management.”

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The Results

Thanks to Solace’s technology, and attention to their requirements as what Gorgeot calls a “true partner,” Les Mousquetaires has deployed over 450 new flows into production in just two years, successfully implementing EDA for all of the use cases they envisioned with very fast time-to-market. They have, for example, implemented new systems that have or will soon:

• Use artificial intelligence to greatly improve the accuracy of orders
• Automatically disseminate real-time product updates
• Enable them to change the prices of fruits and vegetables daily

Chiche gives the store floor perspective on those particular innovations:

“These innovations will make our lives easier in the store because our stock will be updated in real-time with the latest inventory as online orders are made and pickup orders are prepared, and we have real-time management throughout the day for all devices.”

Conclusion

Les Mousquetaires story is just one of many retailers reinventing themselves for the digital age through event-driven architecture. You can learn more here, and if you have specific questions I suggest you book a consultation today so we can set up a time for you to talk with one of our retail experts.