Delhaize Group

This little piggy went to market: making meat distribution tracking easier for Delhaize

Delhaize Group is a leading food retailer, headquartered in Belgium, that operates food supermarkets in North America, Europe and Southeast Asia.

The company employs approximately 142,500 people and its sales in 2006 were 19.2 billion euro.

Delhaize wanted to improve the end-to-end tracking of its goods, and to increase the productivity of its logistics process.

Increasingly, leading distributors rely on a new technology called Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID), and Delhaize needed a way to test this RFID system to see if it would stand up to difficult circumstances - like those found in

IBM Global Business Services helped Delhaize develop and implement a pilot track-and-trace system for its meat distribution center using RFID.

Our consultants' first job was to choose the right technology and select the best RFID tag provider.

Next, a realistic testing environment was set up at the IBM Test Center in La Gaude, France.

Based on this experience, the client felt confident in taking the test to the next level: by integrating RFID in its applications and deploying it in a trial store.

If successfully deployed on a global scale, Delhaize will be able to track meat products from meat distribution centers to store counters worldwide.

To be successful on this type of project our consultants needed to have a genuine interest in applying new technologies and an eagerness and determination to make those technologies work for the client's situation.

For Delhaize we involved a combination of specialist technical professionals like Java specialists as well as IT architects, IT developers and project managers. In addition to working as a strong team, they needed to be independent problem solvers when it came to their own area of expertise.