Major Grocer Gains a More Cost-Effective Cloud Transition

The Challenge

One of the world’s largest retail grocery chains made a pivotal decision to migrate its systems, applications, and data to a new primary public cloud provider. The transition required careful budgetary and workforce planning to support a smooth move. Leadership had also decided that the transition and subsequent modernization would follow an application-by-application strategy, requiring buy-in from internal teams at different stages of the process.

With projects moving through different stages, the organization needed a clear way to understand application-level expenses, maintain budget discipline, and coordinate the technical requirements of each transition. Financial visibility and hands-on cloud expertise were both important to supporting a controlled migration.

The Solution

Aditi analyzed the current pricing model, budget restrictions, and cloud-usage efficiency. Aditi brought in a business analyst to develop a comprehensive showback and chargeback pricing model to help each team adhere to budgetary restrictions. The model was configured year by year: application-team expenses were categorized during the first fiscal year and charged back in the second year after each subproject was complete.

Aditi integrated an accessible dashboard that allowed executives and application teams to review project details, charges, and assignments. This supported transparency and accountability across teams and gave stakeholders a clearer view of the financial responsibilities associated with the migration.

Aditi subsequently sourced and deployed experienced cloud engineers to assist application teams throughout the transition and help define project requirements. Their work included supporting the dashboard, assessing the technical components needed for a successful migration, and evaluating which systems, data, and proprietary processes needed to be prepared for the transition.