Design of an Over The Air (OTA) service for Auchan

Auchan is the second main supermarket distributor after its competitor Carrefour and records a turnover of 53,4 billion of euros for 3,836 hypermarkets and convenience shops in 16 countries. In parallel of its mass retail activities, Auchan also operates in the real estate, baking and telecom industries.

We supported the distributor for two on-demand projects.

Updating thousands of devices remotely

Auchan distributes hundreds of thousands of mobile phones of its own label in B2C and thus, to several countries in the European Union. Because each country doesn’t have the same technical regulations or similar infrastructures, the distributor wanted to have a tool enabling a device control remotely, in particular for deploying the latest updates quickly.

We then have designed an Over The Air (OTA) service in platform as a service (PaaS). The platform is installed on Auchan’s servers and can update products from a centralized location for security patches or features improvement. The platform can also be accessed by several type of users such as Auchan’s employees or factory manufacturers.

Developing a test bed on Android

Android is known for having several versions of its OS (which is not the case on iOS). Auchan noticed that it was necessary to test how qualitative the integration of Android was on its phones when leaving the facility.

The test bed we developed eased the checking process by visualizing screen by screen the different versions on the phones. The tool was also automatized and could send PDF reports directly to the decision-maker.