Read this article about Digitate, Best Achievement in Cultural Transformation & Sustainability to deliver a high performing Enterprise Excellence culture, selected by the independent judging panel, for the 2020 Business Transformation & Operational Excellence Industry Awards program.

Success in retail depends on customer experiences, but in today’s digitally driven age, retailers must also support customer journeys with engaging, next-gen digital technology. Although Loblaw has been a leading food and pharmacy retailer in Canada for over a century, relentless competition and a rapidly changing industry require the chain store to continue innovating with digital investments. 

Its multi-year IT transformation program is focused on improving three critical areas, digital payments, loyalty and rewards, and artificial intelligence (AI) is a key driver across each. In 2018, Loblaws introduced its PC Optimum rewards program, which provides exclusive offers based on customer data, and went live with PC Express, an in-store pickup e-commerce offering across its 700 pickup locations. These programs are two examples of Loblaw’s efforts to boost shopper engagement with digital, customer-centric initiatives.  

After evaluating different AI offerings on the market, Loblaw decided on Digitate’s AI-driven cognitive automation platform for its IT transformation. Along with its powerful capabilities, ignio’s wide variety of SAP uses cases and compatibility with Loblaw’s own SAP environment made it a go-to choice for Ugo Orsi, vice president of technology operations.

Loblaw’s IT team formed a panel of its top solution providers, including Accenture, Cognizant and Tata Consultancy Services, and worked side-by-side with its internal resources to develop a streamlined go-forward strategy and technological approach. After conducting a few months of training on protocols, they were ready to start deployment. The team oversaw the artificial intelligence during those first few months, teaching it the ways of the organization and monitoring processes before enabling the algorithm to make its own decisions. 

Since then, ignio has helped Loblaw reduce mean time to resolve outages to around three to six minutes for specific use cases, as well as automate over 20% of incidents and alerts, and of those 40% are resolved by machines, eliminating the need for human interaction. By using automation to optimize IT and business processes Loblaws has enhanced online and in-store customer experiences, achieved new levels of cost savings. 

With the previous system, when orders would get stuck in Loblaw’s SAP platform due to entry error, they would get locked out, requiring a Loblaw technician to manually log an IT support ticket. On average such tickets would take two days to be resolved. Ultimately this bottleneck led to disruption of the store and negatively affected Loblaw’s ability to serve customers. Now, ignio’s cognitive automation abilities enable it to understand the cause of incidents and prevent or better mitigate them in the future.  

By automating its IT support, the retailer is driving the success of its current customer-centric digital initiatives and overall operations as well as acquiring the capabilities necessary to deliver future innovation at the pace and direction set by the retail industry. 

Loblaw is also working with ignio to expand use cases throughout the company, which speaks to the versatility of Digitate’s solution as it can be applied across departments and functions. In fact, ignio is currently being applied to as many as 200 different use cases within Loblaw, with more to come.

Business Transformation & Operational Excellence Industry Awards 2020

About the Awards

The Business Transformation & Operational Excellence Awards have been established to showcase globally the most outstanding organizational achievements through the application of Operational Excellence programs. Click here to view the Press Release.

The winners will be announced at the Awards Ceremony at The Business Transformation & Operational Excellence World Awards (BTOES) on Wednesday, March 25th, 2020, from 6.30pm in the Venetian Ballroom at the Loews Portofino Bay Hotel at Universal Orlando Resort.

The Business Transformation & Operational Excellence Awards are open to all organizations, both private and public sector, across the globe, which have implemented Operational Excellence programs to deliver outstanding business results.

The Awards will be held in conjunction with the Business Transformation & Operational Excellence World Summit, BTOES 2020 in the beautiful Venetian Ballroom on March 25, 2020 at the Loews Portofino Bay Hotel at Universal Orlando™️. Click to access the agenda, view the current speakers, and watch the highlights video from last year.

BTOES.com

The issues in this article are just one of topic areas that are going to be discussed at the Business Transformation & Operational Excellence World Summit & Industry

BTOES is the industry’s biggest and best, senior-level, cross-industry gathering of Business Transformation & Operational Excellence industry leaders and senior executives.

It also hosts the Business Transformation & Operational Excellence Awards, which showcase globally the most outstanding organizational achievements through the application of Operational Excellence programs.

The summits hosts a number of private forums for C-Level & Global corporate-level leaders as well as business unit heads.

With over 150 speakers, over 100 sessions, 12 Keynotes, 9 Track Themes, 5 parallel tracks, 60+ track sessions, 50 roundtable discussions, 20 Interactive Workshops, 6 Thought Leader Panels, 5 Leaders Boardrooms, 5 co-located events, the Industry Awards Program, Site Visits, 20+ hours of social networking including 2 gala cocktail parties, dinners, numerous group activities, this is the ultimate event to benchmark, network and drive Operational Excellence to the next level.

Quick Links

Speakers

Agenda

BTOES Awards

There is a strong focus on Cultural Transformation, Customer Delight, Sustaining an Operational Excellence program, Need for end-to-end Business Transformation, Keeping up with new technologies/impact of digitalization and Leadership Buy-in & Understanding. We dedicated two tracks to advanced technologies, such as AI, Machine Learning, RPA, Predictive Analytics, Blockchain, Cloud infrastructure etc.

The agenda is designed to encourage active meaningful conversations though all day enhanced networking and interaction opportunities, including

• All-day Refreshment & Themed Breaks

• 1¼ Hour Hot Breakfast Networking Sessions

• 1½ Hour Hot Plated Networking Lunches with Topic & Industry Sector focussed tables

• 1½ Hour Roundtable Sessions by Topic & Industry Sector.

• Keynote & Themes Panel Sessions

• Hosted Welcome Receptions from 5.30pm

• Expanded more lavish Awards Program

• Newly launched Night Summit for attendees to meet after dinner

For more information or to discuss the summit in more detail please schedule a call below,

Click here to schedule a call.