Colruyt Collect&Go

How Tricentis NeoLoad helped a popular grocery delivery service prepare for the high load of its revamped site launch

Colruyt Collect & Go logo full color

Company overview

Colruyt Collect&Go is an online grocery shopping service. Colruyt collects the groceries and makes them available to customers for home delivery service or at over 200 pick-up points in Belgium and Luxembourg. Every day, 10,000 customers place an order on the Collect&Go website or the app.

Colruyt Collect&Go was founded in 2000 and is the Belgian market leader for online grocery shopping. Collect&Go is part of the Colruyt Group, a family-owned retail corporation that manages the Colruyt supermarkets in Belgium, France, and Luxembourg.

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    Industry: Retail, Food & Beverage
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    Organization size: 33,000 employees
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    Location: Belgium, France, and Luxembourg
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Grocery basket

Ensuring a fast load time for a revamped website

Colruyt Collect&Go’s customers wanted the ability to change their order after they sent it and be able to find products and discounts faster on the site. Colruyt decided to revamp the Collect&Go website and app to provide a more accessible online shopping experience for Colruyt’s customers by adding these new features :

  • Customers can adapt their order until 9 a.m. on the day before they pick it up.
  • Based on the history of a customer’s purchases, the checkout process is optimized to include ‘missed favorites’ for regularly bought items that are not in the customer’s shopping basket.
  • A smart ‘calculation engine’ applies promotions when orders are placed.

But before the site and app could launch with these new features, Colruyt needed to ensure that the revamp could sustain the expected high load and assure a good response time in order to meet customer expectations for a seamless shopping engagement.

Delivering performance testing with speed and scale

For more than 20 years, Belgium-based Key-Performance has been helping organizations improve their performance engineering. Colruyt selected Key-Performance because of its extensive experience and methodology with load testing.

Sri Phanindra, Performance Test Manager at Colruyt Group, said, “The Key-Performance team has the best combination of talent, skills, and attitude, which helped us in critical performance delivery.”

Colruyt considered other load testing tools, such as Blazemeter, but ultimately chose Tricentis NeoLoad for its ability to simplify and scale performance testing. Key-Performance implemented highly-scalable Tricentis NeoLoad plus Dynatrace’s monitoring tool.

Aquilain Barvaux, Performance Architect at Key-Performance, acknowledges that the tools are essential. “We needed the NeoLoad tool to allow us to write the scenarios fast, with the correct parameters, and make it easy to maintain. Dynatrace, the back-end monitoring tool, provides the necessary information to diagnose bottlenecks correctly and where/what to improve.”

During the load testing, the main components of the Colruyt site were subjected to a realistic load to ensure that the site could handle the expected business volumes without any significant performance degradation. Key-Performance conducted the Colruyt Collect&Go load test with NeoLoad in a production environment to provide a safe methodology that avoided a crash of the Colruyt system. Other Colruyt applications ran simultaneously, and a malfunction would have had dramatic consequences for the business.

Reducing time and scripts with NeoLoad

Colruyt successfully launched its revamped website and app without any issues. Tricentis NeoLoad helped Colruyt overcome its challenge of sustaining a high load on its website by making it easy to adapt to last-minute changes in the scripts, the integration with Dynatrace, and the ability to generate reports automatically.

Key-Performance wrote six scripts to adapt as closely as possible to realistic scenarios. Each script was approximately 130 steps as Key-Performance randomly added between 70 and 150 articles in the Colruyt Collect&Go grocery cart. With NeoLoad, Key-Performance wrote the six scripts in one week. Previously, it took Colruyt one month to write one script without NeoLoad.

As the project evolved, Key-Performance provided critical training and education to Colruyt’s internal staff. This transfer of knowledge ensured that Colruyt could continuously use the Tricentis NeoLoad solution to meet the established performance baselines and the ability to do future tests on their own.

A project leader at Colruyt said, “One of the reasons of the success is thanks to the help of Key-Performance. They not only provided good technical expertise but also took the time to deeply understand the business needs and company culture, and helped us transform our load testing plan.”

The successful project was founded on good collaboration between the Colruyt and Key-Performance teams. “When you work with business line managers, project leaders, and IT teams abroad plus a back-end team in Belgium, you need perfect synchronization. Everybody was always a part of the solution, no one was a part of the problem,” said Michel Kalis, Managing Director of Key-Performance.

Colruyt was able to avoid the classical traps of load testing with a legacy solution through the guidance of an experienced partner that understood its testing goals and environment. Key-Performance helped Colruyt ramp rapidly in deriving the most value from the beneficial NeoLoad tool and led Colruyt to achieving an improved customer online shopping experience.

 

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