Digital Intelligence leader New Relic, Inc. (NYSE: NEWR) announced Ocado, the world’s largest dedicated online grocery retailer, turned to the New Relic Digital Intelligence Platform for improved visibility into systems and collaboration within teams. Since adopting New Relic, Ocado has been able to confidently migrate and scale their infrastructure in the cloud, ensure they provide superior customer experiences, and improve the performance within their automated warehouses.

Founded in 2000 as the United Kingdom’s first dedicated online supermarket, Ocado now serves more than 600,000 customers and exceeds £1 billion in annual sales. The company’s success in transforming the online grocery business—and online retailing overall—is through Ocado Technology, a more than 1,000 person organization tackling diverse projects and challenges in cloud computing, robotics, artificial intelligence, big data, and the Internet of Things.

Ocado initially turned to New Relic as they migrated their infrastructure to Amazon Web Services. The migration was necessary to gain flexibility and scalability to support the growth of ocado.com and Ocado Smart Platform (OSP), an e-commerce solution the company partners with traditional grocers and other retailers to deliver an end-to-end supply chain. New Relic provided the visibility and ultimately the confidence that the migration was successful through real-time metrics enabling Ocado to address issues early and understand cloud infrastructure and how it could best be leveraged.

New Relic has become a common measurement and communication tool for the geographically spread Ocado Technology organization. With New Relic, Ocado is able to ensure it is delivering a consistent customer experience, no matter where performance issues may arise including:

• Back-end systems. Performance degradations are visualized and tracked through New Relic Insights allowing engineers to identify issues between seemingly unrelated systems.
• Behavior within the browser. As Ocado has moved to provide a more responsive experience for customers, New Relic Browser allows engineers to ensure the performance within the browser, from a common platform with backend performance data.
• Savings in automated warehouses. Ocado has developed unique, highly automated warehouses to handle the wide range of size and shapes of their more than 50,000 item inventory. An elaborate system of sensors and bots pack and ship more than one million items a day, delivering operational efficiencies for the business. Using New Relic Insights, engineers were able to identify a mis-reporting sensor which was requiring manual intervention and worth £35,000 per year in real labor costs.

Executive Comments

“New Relic provides the extra visibility into our systems and platforms which we need. It gave us confidence that our migration was going as expected and we were in a very good position to address any issues early,” said Peter Thomas, head of E-Commerce OSP at Ocado Technology. “With New Relic by our side we feel prepared to take on challenges and deliver on our motto ‘shopping made easy’ to provide the superior customer experience we are best known for.”

“It’s exciting to collaborate with an innovative company such as Ocado who pushes the boundaries and uncovers new ways to leverage New Relic’s platform,” said Bruno Teuber, senior vice president, EMEA enterprise sales at New Relic. “Ocado demonstrates the importance of visibility and measurement New Relic provides to not only online retailers, but also potential applications for technology organizations working on advanced projects including robotics and the Internet of Things.”

Additional Resources

Read more on Ocado’s journey with New Relic and watch Anne Marie Neatham, chief operating officer of Ocado Technology, present at FutureStack: London on the changing face of online shopping, from the customer experience in the browser to bots packing orders in the company’s automated warehouses.