COVID-19: Drakes Supermarkets upgrades IT

Australia’s Drakes Supermarkets has replaced its ageing IT to better serve customers during COVID-19

Drakes Supermarkets is the largest independent retailer grocer in Australia and operates more than 60 stores with more than 6,000 staff.

The retailer is working with Nutanix and Adelaide-based IT partner, Nuago, to replace its IT environment with Nutanix Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI).

The new infrastructure now supports Drakes’ $125 million, state-of-the-art automated distribution centre in South Australia’s Edinburgh North, including its advanced robotics technology, warehouse management, point of sales (POS) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems – enabling the retailer to access and respond to real-time stock demand.

Availability maintained

The 50,000+ square metre facility and accompanying technology upgrade proved to be timely. “We’ve seen our warehousing and IT requirements more than double in the past few weeks, but we’ve maintained 100 per cent availability across all of our systems,” said Drakes IT Manager, Phillip Romano.

 “We can now focus on taking care of our communities’ shopping needs, getting those staff who can do to work remotely, and hire new staff directly from the increasing pool of unemployed Australians.”