Presentation

Description

Intermarché is a supermarket chain belonging to the French retail group Les Mousquetaires. It has 2300 outlets in Europe, 1840 of which are in France, and also sells its products on its marketplace. An association of independent retailers based in Auvergne and belonging to Intermarché decided to create an app to foster short distribution channels, and called upon Scopika, a web agency based in Clermont-Ferrand.

Digital activity

Intermarché: online sales, IT management, logistics, communication and adverstising. Scopika: website creation, apps, coaching, websdesign, IT development, training, E-marketing.

Good practice targeted

Environmental

To go further

https://www.scopika.com/

Good practice

An association of independent retailers belonging to Intermarché called upon Scopika to create an app dedicated to local producers in order to foster short distribution channels. The app allows them to enter, in real time, their production in order to sell it to the closest Intermarché stores. Scopika designed the app according to several criteria : inclusion (most of the time, vegetable producers are not accustomed to digital practices), and digital sobriety. To achieve the inclusion goal, Scopika designed a very simple interface, in which very few actions are required. Plus, as vegetable producers don’t have the same professional jargon as Intermarché – most producers think in terms of packages of vegetable crates, wheareas Intermarché usually thinks in terms of kilograms –, Scopika worked on the translation of the information by algorithms which ensure the automatic conversion of data. As for the digital sobriety goal, Scopika chose an « old-fashionned » PHP and MySQL custom development, in order to deliver a very light app. The app can aslo easily be maintained, there are no layers or frameworks to update in front office. All the scripts and CSS were custom-designed, the code is very light, and the number of items on HTLM pages were drastically reduced.

Costs

30k - 50k €

Starting date of the good practice

2019

Time to implement the good practice

7 months

Tools/partners/suppliers of the good practice

Scopika
Green IT

Interview of Joël Mossand, CEO - SCOPIKA

What are the benefits of the project ?

The project fits with the values and commitment of Intermarché, the app allowed something which was not possible before, that’s to say working with local producers in a fair trade logic. The app also fosters fluidity in communication and many other processes.

What were the constraints faced by the company ?

The main challenge was to find a way to translate the different languages of the vegetable producers (packages, vegetable crates) and Intermarché (kilograms or tons), so that everyone can use the app without doing extra work or having to change process. To do so, we created algorithms to allow automatic conversions. We first encountered reluctance from some of the supervisors of Intermarché : when used to manage data through Excel sheets, it can be hard to trust an algorithm and let it calculate everything, it’s a great change in work habits. We had to work on acculturation.

Which advice would give to another company ?

About digital sobriety, I have a simple advice : think minimalism. You need to put a brake on ideas which could lead you to produce « just in case » or « if ever », and make only what’s necessary and useful. We made that deal with the Intermarché teams : on 20 stores, if only one of them formulates a specific need, we simply say no. Minimalism also meets time criteria : the app needed to work fast in order to obtain buy-in of the vegetable producers who have many other things to deal with. Another advice : avoid creating mobile apps when it’s not necessary. For Intermarché, we decided to create a web app because mobile implies constant updates, requires a smartphone, which is neither ecologic nor inclusive. We wanted vegetable producers to be able to use the app, even when not used to digital, so the app was designed to be able to work on an old browser or an old computer. My last advice is about methodology : work a lot on the functionnal and technical briefs in order to avoid a huge iteration cycle. We tried to limit iterations by building a prototype thanks to Adobe XD. It allowed vegetable producers to test the app and make feedbacks. We could rework and readapt it according to their very specific needs.