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Bermola

CASE STUDY

Sainsbury's warehouse & fulfilment optimisation

How Bermola Consulting helped one of the UK's largest supermarket chains re-engineer a mission-critical digital platform to support its extensive grocery e-commerce services and nationwide fulfilment centres.

Sainsbury's Food to Order platters

Overview

Sainsbury’s, one of the UK’s largest supermarket chains, partnered with Bermola Consulting to transform a legacy e-commerce platform that had become a critical bottleneck for online ordering and downstream warehouse operations. The objective was to re-engineer the digital backbone, ensuring that e-commerce, warehouse, and supply chain systems could scale effectively with demand.

Retail & E-commerceSainsbury's

The challenge

Re-engineering a high-volume retail platform

The legacy e-commerce and fulfilment platform created operational friction across the supply chain.

Hover over each challenge to learn more.

  • The Problem

    The legacy monolithic platform struggled to handle peak demand, leading to slow response times and order processing delays.

    The Impact

    This bottleneck directly impacted revenue, customer satisfaction, and created a poor user experience during high-traffic periods.

Our approach

A strategy for true transformation

Our approach was an integrated strategy focused on modernising Sainsbury's food-to-order e-commerce and fulfilment ecosystem. We replaced the legacy platform with a modern, scalable architecture to support high-volume operations and enable rapid future growth.

A selection of Food to Order platters from Sainsbury's

Microservices architecture

Orchestrated a seamless transition from a monolithic platform to a scalable, microservices-based architecture using Node.js, PHP, and Python, ensuring uninterrupted service.

Modern frontend

Delivered a responsive user experience with a React/Redux frontend, featuring server-side rendering under HTTP/2 for optimal performance.

Container orchestration

Built a resilient and scalable infrastructure by transitioning to Kubernetes and Docker for simplified deployments and management.

Cloud-Native solutions

Leveraged AWS Lambda and SQS to build a highly scalable, event-driven system capable of handling high-volume operations.

Automated CI/CD pipelines

Implemented modern DevOps practices with GitHub and Jenkins to accelerate safe and reliable software releases.

Secure payments integration

Integrated multiple secure payment gateways, including Datacash, Mastercard, PayPal, Apple Pay, and Google Pay.

The impact

From operational bottleneck to strategic asset

The comprehensive re-engineering of the e-commerce and fulfilment platform converted a critical operational liability into a strategic asset, yielding significant improvements across both business and operational domains. By replacing the monolithic legacy system with a flexible, resilient, and scalable microservices architecture, we eliminated critical performance bottlenecks. This modernisation directly translated into tangible gains, including faster order processing, reduced system maintenance, and substantially improved uptime, allowing Sainsbury's to handle peak demand without compromising performance. This newfound operational agility and reliability improves customer satisfaction and loyalty and allows their engineering teams to focus on innovation, enabling the business to adapt quickly to market changes and solidify its leadership position in the competitive online grocery sector.

Close-up of the Food to Order feature on Sainsbury's website
Faster order processing
30%
Fewer maintenance hours
40%
System uptime
Enhanced
Inventory flow
Real-time

Technology highlights

Backend & services

Node.jsPHPSymfony frameworkAWS Lambda

Frontend

ReactServer-side renderingHTTP/2

Infrastructure

KubernetesDockerGitHubJenkins CI/CD

Payments

DatacashWorldpayMastercardPayPalApple PayGoogle Pay

Ready to modernise e-commerce and fulfilment?

If legacy order and fulfilment platforms are slowing growth, we can help you re-engineer them into resilient services that process orders faster and scale with demand.

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