(upbeat music) >> We just compressed about a decade of online commerce progress into about 13 or 14 months. So now we're going to look at how one retailer navigated through the pandemic and what the future of their business looks like. And with me is Alan Jensen who is the chief information officer and senior vice president of the Salling Group. Hello, Alan, how are you? >> Fine, thank you. >> Good to see you. Look, you know, when I look at the hundred year history plus of your company, I mean, it's a marked by transformations and some of them are quite dramatic. So you're Denmark's largest retailer. I wonder if you could share a little bit more about the company its history and how it continues to improve the customer experience while at the same time keeping costs under control so vital in your business. >> Yeah, the company founded approximately 100 year ago with a department store in Denmark. And I think in the 60s we founded the first supermarket in Denmark with the self-service and combined textile and food in the same store. And in the beginning 70s, we found that the first hypermarket in Denmark and then the discounter came from Germany early in 1980 and we started a discount chain. And so we are actually building department store in hypermarket in supermarket, and in the discount sector. And today we are more than 1,500 stores in three different countries in Denmark, Poland, and Germany. And especially for the Danish market we have a approximately 38% market share and it is the leader. We have over the last 10 years developed further into online first in non-food and now in food with home delivery with Clayton Calais. And we have done some acquisition in the convenience with me box solutions to our customers. And we have today also some restaurant burger chain and we are running the Starbucks in Denmark. So you can see a full plate of different opportunities for our customer in especially Denmark. >> It's an awesome story. And of course the founder's name is still on the masthead. What a great legacy. Now, of course the pandemic has forced many changes quite dramatic including the behaviors of retail customers. Maybe you could talk a little bit about how your digital transformation at the Salling Group prepared you for this shift in consumption patterns and any other challenges that you faced. >> I think luckily as for some of the you can say the coati solution in 19 we just roll out using our computers. We are direct access, so you can work from anywhere whether you are traveling from home and so on. We introduced a new age from delivery model and we just finalized the rolling out teams in January, February 20. And that was some very strong thing for suddenly moving all our employees from office to home and more or less overnight we succeed continuing our work and for IT We have not missed any deadline or task for the business in 2020. So I think that was a pretty awesome to see. And for the business, of course the pandemic changed a lot as the change in customer behavior, more or less overnight with plus 50, 80% on the online solution forced us to do some different priorities as we were looking at food home delivery and originally expected to start rolling out in 2022 but took a fast decision in April last year to launch immediately. And we have been developing that over the last eight months and has been live for the last three months now in the market. So you can say the pandemic really front-loaded some of our strategic actions for two to three years. >> What's that saying? Luck is the by-product of great planning and preparation. So let's talk about... what happened? >> And when you are in a company with some strong financial situation that you can move immediately with investment when you take such a decision, then it's really failing yeah. >> Right, awesome. Two-part question. Talk about how you leverage data to support the Solent group's mission and you know drive value for customers. And maybe you could talk about some of the challenges you face with just the amount of data, the speed of data, et cetera. >> Yeah, I said data is everything when you are in retail, as retail is detail as you need to monitor your operation down to each store each department. And if you can say, we have challenged that data is just growing rapidly as a year by year it's growing more and more because you're able to be more detailed, you're able to capture more data. And for a company like ours we need to be updated every morning as our fully updated sales for all unit department single skew selling in the stores is updated three o'clock in the night and send out to all top management and our managers all over the company. It's actually 8,000 reports going out before six o'clock every day in the morning. We have introduced a loyalty program and we are capturing a lot of data on customer behavior. What is their preferred of us? What is their preferred time in the week for buying different things. And all these data is now used to personalize our offers to our value customers. So we can be exactly hitting the best time and convert it to sales. Data is also now used for what we call intelligent price reductions so instead of just reducing prices with 50% if it's a close to running out of date now the system automatically calculate whether a store has just enough to finish with full price before end of day, or actually have too much and need to maybe reduce by 80% before. So being able to sell. So these automated solutions build on data is bringing efficiency into our operation. >> Wow, you make it sound easy. These are non-trivial items. So congratulations on that. I wonder if we could close HPE was kind enough to introduce us, tell us a little bit about the infrastructure of the solutions you're using how they differentiate you in the market. And I'm interested in you know why HPE what distinguishes them, why they choose there. >> When you look out a lot is looking at moving data to the cloud, but we still believe that due to performance, due to the availability, more or less on demand, we still don't see the cloud strong enough for Salling Group capturing all our data. We have been quite successfully having one data truth across the whole company and having one just one single BI solution and having that huge amount of data. I think we have one of the 10 largest sub business warehouses global. And on the other hand we also want to be agile and want to scale when needed. So getting close to a cloud solution, we saw it be GreenLake as a solution, getting close to the cloud but still being on-prem and could deliver what we need to have fast performance on data, but still in a high quality and still very secure for us to run. >> Great, thank you for that. Alan thanks so much for your time really appreciate your insights and congratulations on the progress and best of luck in the future. >> Thank you. >> All right, keep it right there. We have tons more content coming. You're watching Accelerating Next from HPE. (upbeat music)