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Tesco's self-developed route planner has been put to good use and made more efficient.

Recent years have completely changed shopping habits. Retail units serving customers have had to fundamentally rethink their operations, not only in terms of workforce, but also in terms of development. In the case of Tesco, in parallel with all this, it was impossible to ignore the constant replenishment of store shelves, which requires complex logistics software. New technological solutions were introduced for the first time in the United Kingdom.

A colleague’s doctoral thesis became a graphics engine

In the UK, many roads are closed at night from freight traffic, but an important point is that the supermarket chain uses 26 modes of transport for deliveries, so the problem of “travel agents” (i.e. back to the center – everything is on the shortest route and with the lowest fuel consumption), it is also important that they do not get stuck, for example, in a too low tunnel. The equation also includes 4,000 department store outlets in the UK and 7,000 cars in the fleet. ) plays a role, so there is definitely no question why a system of their own design was needed – such was Hive, developed by the Transport and Fulfillment team, which is partly based in Hungary, originally written in Python and completed on the basis of the developer’s doctoral dissertation.

Beehive, written in Python, continues to run Java-based

several reasons why Tesco decided to move to Java. Financial considerations are just one of them, as the annual cost of the Hive cloud was a significant item that was halved with the move to Java. Another important aspect is efficiency: while the original system took more than an hour to build a graph, the new, more resource-efficient Java-based Hive completes this task in minutes. Of course, the reason for such a significant improvement is not only the difference between the two programming languages, but also the many optimizations that the developers made in the process.

In order for Tesco Technology to provide further development and all the best solutions, they are constantly looking for specialists for their team – they primarily need V-shaped developers, where the top V represents a thorough knowledge of Java, and the broad branches are various horizontal competencies – this can be DevOps, but also stakeholder management, as well as presentation skills. The right people will be able to work on interesting graphics engine-like projects even in a company-supported home office.

Developments that make a better world

The graphics engine is also a great example of how a well-developed system also has a positive impact on the environment, because thanks to this, Tesco not only reduces high costs, but can also optimize the kilometers, which, by definition, means burning less fuel and therefore fewer emissions. And what does this mean in concrete terms? Last year it drove 4.6 million miles less, 2.3 million pounds less fuel costs and 5.3 million kilograms less CO2 emissions. And the calculations for this year even go far beyond that, with current estimates of £5.7m in fuel cost savings expected by 2022, including 11.4m miles cut and reduction of carbon dioxide emissions by 13 million kg.

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