Auchan Retail International (Auchan) operates in 12 countries, with stores in 11 and with one franchised operation in Africa. Its French and Spanish stores have the largest revenue share, with the French stores accounting for more than half of the group’s revenue. In total, the group generates €32.3 billion in yearly revenue, with nearly 154,000 employees and 2,354 points of sale. Of these, 62,000 employees and 687 points of sale are in France.
Auchan also runs a unique e-commerce site for drive-throughs, click-and-collect orders, and deliveries, offering products specifically available in the customer’s region. To handle all the IT required for an operation of this scale, Auchan uses information repositories and operational data relating to prices, products, receipts, sites, suppliers, and naming conventions. In 2017, however, an initial switch was made that led to the introduction of MongoDB.
Migration from relational to modern databases
That year, Auchan’s IT team decided to replace its relational technology–based environment with NoSQL to provide more responsive repositories. ,“We were quite satisfied with our cloud-hosted infrastructure, but we began to experience scalability issues and prohibitive hosting costs,” said Florent Laloux, IT Data Project Director at Auchan Retail International.
To handle sharp increases in traffic and distribute the load, the company was scaling horizontally—that is, adding hardware components like servers, even temporarily. Furthermore, the company was paying €1.2 million a year for hosting. This was enough to push the company to launch a feasibility study, particularly to consider MongoDB’s proposals for migrating databases to a new environment.
With the company managing 30 operational data repositories that are available to businesses, as well as storing more than 3 billion documents, this was a substantial project.
An extensive proof of concept
Embarking on such a project requires specialized skills and reliable partners. Auchan therefore relied on ADVANCED Schema, a company that specializes in data transformation.
The challenge for the group was twofold: migrating its two databases containing information repositories into a single database on MongoDB and achieving €500,000 in annual savings on hosting costs.
To ensure the project’s success and solidify consistent functionality after the switchover, Auchan began a proof of concept (PoC) and established ADVANCED Schema’s full commitment to the deadline, with the support of MongoDB’s technical teams.
For the PoC, extensive development and testing were carried out in each area to ensure that data was properly indexed and accessible via APIs.
“We identified three key criteria for the final project,” said Laloux. The first was a study of migration costs, estimated at €438,000. However, compared to the company’s hosting costs of €500,000, this represented important savings.
The second criterion was the joint proposal from MongoDB and ADVANCED Schema to ensure that the migration took no more than 500 days—something that Auchan’s IT team couldn’t achieve alone due to lack of time and resources. MongoDB and ADVANCED Schema could achieve this target through the formation of agile squads, with the two companies working together with Auchan’s IT team to meet the challenge. This trust in each other’s skills would ultimately be the foundation of success.
Finally, the third criterion was enabling the use of “cloud credits,” which companies could earn by hosting on Auchan’s cloud architecture platform. The credits enable companies to access a range of cloud services with either no costs or reduced up-front costs to test and integrate solutions. “This made it possible to finance almost the entire migration project,” said Laloux.
A successful and profitable switchover
Working against the clock, Auchan gave the green light following a successful completion of the PoC in October 2023. It followed a three-month development phase with qualification and user validation tests. It then deployed a new organization system to eight of the countries in which Auchan operates.
In May 2024, the IT team phased out the old architecture in favor of MongoDB Atlas. Auchan met its schedule, upskilled its IT team, and achieved a 100 percent return on investment by mid-2024. The switchover and profitability were successful, while business-critical functionalities remained unchanged.
For users, the primary advantage of the migration is the possibility to execute operations in real time; reports are processed instantly. Auchan also benefits from greater flexibility, thanks to technologies integrated into MongoDB, such as MongoDB App Services CLI.
A scalable, sustainable, and cost-effective solution
“In 20 years of experience, I’ve rarely seen projects run so smoothly,” noted Laloux. A total of 32 people collaborated on the successful migration, showing the importance of team synergy and mutual trust—not to mention a well-executed preliminary feasibility study.
Today, Auchan’s MongoDB environment is working optimally in the eight countries where it was deployed. The group’s IT teams are proficient in using MongoDB Atlas, and users can access repositories much faster than before, yielding great user satisfaction.
Using its MongoDB ecosystem, Auchan now offers Auchan Retail Management, a scalable, sustainable, and cost-effective platform.
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