TESCO reveals details of global operating mode

As reported in Retail Week, Tesco has released more details on the new operating model that it is rolling out to its countries of operation. Tesco enterprise architect for infrastructure Charlie Hope-Lang expanded on the model at an industry event last week, stating that the company recognises it is important to repeat the business processes, but also to use the same systems for economies of scale and to simplify things.

Hope-Lang is heading the development of a scalable infrastructure that each international operation will be able to adopt over time. He said: "We are almost at the stage where we have a reference architecture. Once we have that completed, we can map what each country has to it." Tesco is also porting its in-house developed systems, which reside on legacy infrastructure, onto a modern open-standards platform, where they can be scaled. He added: "We have key intellectual property in certain parts of our in-house systems that we are porting from a mainframe to open-standards systems. We don't want to roll out mainframes around the world, but we want to be able to put these systems in start-up countries." An evolution of the operating model will be ongoing. Hope-Lang said: "We are designing a service-oriented architecture in the operating model but, if we look at the way the model is formed, the approach is already there; we are just formalising it."

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