Increasing Delivered Margins for Tesco Direct

Turning Data into a Weekly Delivery

Tesco is the world’s third-largest retailer, and the largest in the UK, operating more than 94 million square feet of retail space and employing nearly half a million people. Since 2006, they have also operated Tesco Direct, a multi-channel online business, offering customers the option of ordering goods for collection in store or delivery to their homes.

Our Understanding

Tesco was only too aware that the profitability of every order depends significantly upon the ordering and delivery option chosen by each customer through its multi- channel ordering capability. With this in mind, we immediately understood that Delivered Margin was a key metric affecting both profitability and business decision-making.

Our Approach

​Our scoping workshops revealed that Tesco had already developed a Microsoft Access model in-house. While this was adequate for providing directional insight, it was too slow, unreliable, inflexible and inaccurate to enable measuring of robust KPI’s. Worse, it took three weeks to process monthly data, when there was a clear business need for reports to be delivered on a weekly basis. CadDo was engaged to implement a reporting model using a cost management solution providing the pace and agility required to support a high transaction environment. To keep implementation cost to a minimum, the model was migrated by CadDo ‘as-is’, minimising the need to build a model from scratch.

Measures of Success

The project was a clear success in terms of its original scope, as CadDo is now a single and verifiable source of truth for ESG data, informing the investment decision-making process and providing fund managers and investors alike with complete transparency. At the same time, the successful deployment of CadDo’s cloud-based metadata modelling has enabled:
  • More frequent and granular evaluation of fund make-up, highlighting ESG outliers and red flags
  • Clearer communications between Actiam and its clients about fund and portfolio performance, through online performance dashboards
  • Fresh opportunities for Actiam as an industry leader in the realm of responsible investing, supporting other fund and asset managers looking for help with their own ESG strategies