Business cases

Claris FileMaker to support ambitious expansion and sustainable development of Globus in Russia

We sat down with Globus, a global chain of highly technical hypermarkets, to discuss about how Claris FileMaker helped them deploy an effective control system to monitor technical services and infrastructure.

Cathy

15 February 2022 • 5 min

Technological infrastructure in the service of customer experience

Globus, a global chain of hypermarkets, started off in Germany in 1828 as a family business and nowadays counts 47 hypermarkets in Germany, 15 in the Czech Republic, and 19 in Russia, where it opened its first Hyperglobus store 15 years ago. Its slogan – “The world is turning around you” – is particularly true in Russia, where the hypermarket chain has its own food production facilities – processing 10 tons of meat every day; running its own bakery, fish, and grocery production; ensuring flawless operations; and making the customer experience and customer comfort its top priority.

At Globus, they believe that the best customer experience comes not only from the shopping itself, but from creating the most favorable conditions for customers to encourage their contribution to sustainable development initiatives, thus raising awareness of the environmental impact of production, consumption, and more. Customers are rewarded for their plastic recycling efforts. About 70% of the hypermarkets’ parking areas are equipped with charging stations for electric cars, at no additional cost. Shopping halls are coupled with production sites, so customers can enjoy the spectacle of bread being baked and delicacies being prepared right in front of their eyes while shopping.

No doubt such a unique and complete offer requires highly technological facilities that today total 600,000 m² distributed over 19 locations, with their own logistics center and a team of 200 highly experienced engineers and line technicians. Their daily tasks: equipment service and repairs, infrastructure maintenance (ventilation, air conditioning systems, heating, water supply, etc.). Construction, maintenance and expansion-related operations are coordinated from the head office in Moscow by a Construction & Maintenance department that employs 50 specialized engineers and technical experts.

Behind the scenes: a software application

When Vadim Ivanov joined Hyperglobus 5 years ago as a regional chief engineer, the FileMaker platform was already being used to manage technical supplies, warranty claims and outsourcing requests to service companies. Its ability to manage such a large distributed infrastructure and to fine-tune the allocation of resources came as a surprise to Vadim. As he had seen in his previous 13 years of experience in the field, industry practices often involved using “do-not-forget” post-its, spreadsheets, emails, and phone calls for operations management.

To be honest, before starting at Globus, I didn’t know about the existence of such a solution. On multiple occasions, I wished I had had such an Assistant before. It’s one of the ways of managing not only equipment and power consumption but also people, which is extremely convenient.

Vadim Ivanov, Head of Maintenance
Hyperglobus

When time is of the essence

Multiple modules have been developed with FileMaker to solve specific tasks since Vadim became the head of the Maintenance Department–including streamlining maintenance requests, power consumption tracking and planning, and maintenance scheduling, to name a few.

The power consumption tracking and planning module made it possible to reduce the time we needed to consolidate data distributed over 19 locations in order to create a yearly budget from 2 weeks to a few hours.

Vadim Ivanov

The Construction & Maintenance department employees made FileMaker their day-to-day tool, feeding real-time data into the centralized system – they can scan bar codes on the equipment being serviced, even when no network is available, and synchronize information once they are back in the office. As the service requests from all stores are streamlined automatically using workflows, the central coordination office has full visibility and control over all operations. What, where and when became no secret.

“From the management point of view, we can observe employee efficiency and increased implication, and service requests demanding the intervention of our engineers or service companies speed up. It goes without saying that we reduced repairs and maintenance costs”, sums up Vadim.

When asked to look back at possible alternative solutions that could have been put in place to have all operations under control, he replies without hesitation that building a custom app in collaboration with a team of experienced FileMaker developers from TriA was the only viable option:

“We considered various options, but taking into consideration the uniqueness of our production and processes, management methods, and teams requirements, I’d like to emphasize the importance of relying on experienced developers who have lots of interesting implementation ideas. That’s why all our tools have been developed hand in hand with our partners from TriA – from setting up the scope to the implementation.”

Arcady Perla, TriA manager and the leader of a team of five, mentions that when time is of the essence, the flexibility of FileMaker is undeniable:

The greatest advantage of FileMaker [for the clients] and for developers: you don’t need 100% finished technical requirements – you can just start the solution development based on the scope as per the discussion with the client, and then implement adjustments as required, just because FileMaker makes it possible. Of course, it’s essential how experienced the developer is, how quickly he can understand the client’s process and to turn it into solution.

Arcady Perla, Lead Manager at TriA

FileMaker made it possible to set goals based on the strategic decision of Globus board of directors to reduce the power consumption by 30% within 5 years’ time. Within just a couple of weeks, TriA had added a new planning functionality to the already existing power resources module in order to track the exact dynamics as the team moved towards the goal, taking into account real-time events and consumption.

We’re quite ambitious guys, so when the board of directors announces a new project, we can’t afford to waste time with slow operations management tools that don’t provide results.

Vadim Ivanov

Further growth and sustainable development

As Globus continues its expansion in Russia with the plan of building 2 new sites per year, its efforts in reducing its carbon footprint and in leadership in terms of ecological awareness are receiving recognition and numerous awards.

In 2021, Globus’s chain of hypermarkets received the Gold Brick – a top prize – in the “warehouse complex” nomination of the annual professional Commercial Real Estate Moscow Awards (the CRE Awards). The jury for the prize noted that Globus’s logistics center is a site that complies with all modern development requirements for commercial real estate.

The same year, Globus was awarded with the Green Brick for the construction of the most ecological site in the Moscow region. Globus Kommunarka became the “greenest” hypermarket, which implies the sustainability of this site over time.

“Usually, when sharing our experience with colleagues from the same industry, our FileMaker presentation leaves them astounded,” says Vadim. “You’re so organized, structured, and clear.” Everyone sees us as leaders, and we consider ourselves as such. Going forward, we shall continue using FileMaker. We are sure that the software resources we have today will scale up as we grow.”

As new ideas get implemented and the business expands, Globus, TriA, and FileMaker are setting their sights on even grander ambitions, paving the way for further collaboration.