Accelerating Retail Innovation

A leading U.S. grocery retailer embarked on a critical strategic project to modernize its fulfillment, pricing, and transportation systems. Their objective was to construct a high-volume event-driven architecture capable of handling complex, real-time operations across hundreds of locations.

The problem: maintaining infrastructure instead of building features

The architecture team was shipping retail features for fulfillment and pricing. But they kept getting sidelined by constant manual work managing their event infrastructure.

The core issue: fragmented teams building isolated solutions created an architecture where data became untrustworthy for cross-domain work. As the system scaled, the problem got worse.

Then, regulatory pressure turned this into a crisis.

The catalyst: regulatory requirements.

Modern retail supply chains now face the combined pressure of FSMA (Food Safety Modernization Act) regulations and PwC-level control-gap audits. FSMA regulations require end-to-end product traceability in retail supply chains. A recent audit revealed the grocer couldn't prove why shipments were accepted or rejected at receiving docks.

Non-Negotiable Compliance Requirements

• End-to-End Traceability: Tracking product lineage from the manufacturer, through back-door receiving, to the retail shelf.

• Causal Forensics: Identifying exactly what truck a product rode on, who touched it, and the specific conditions of its transit.

• Audit-Ready Decision Trails: Proving exactly why a shipment was accepted or rejected at the point of arrival.

• Tamper-Proof History: Maintaining immutable records that satisfy high-stakes financial and safety control-gap standards.

Traditional architectures fail this test. They only store the current state, overwriting the past. Event sourcing preserves complete history, turning compliance from a burden into an asset.

The grocer needed to move from distributed saga patterns to atomic consistency.

The solution: unified event sourcing platform

The grocer is migrating to Axon Framework 5 and Axon Server, enabling atomic operations across multiple entities and eliminating the need for manual saga orchestration.

Benefits:

• Atomic consistency instead of eventual consistency

• Centralized logic instead of scattered compensation code

• Sub-millisecond queries even as event history scales to billions

• Zero-config consistency

This foundation enables treating their complete event history as a flexible asset for business changes.

Business agility: adapting without migrations

Most retailers are frozen in data models decided years ago. Changing from product-centric to customer-centric fulfillment requires months of data migrations.

With Axon Server, the grocer could redefine business boundaries without moving data. Apply new organizational tags to years of event history in milliseconds. New features ship in weeks instead of quarters.

This complete event history becomes the memory layer for AI.

AI readiness: explainability through architecture

87% of AI models fail to reach production because they're unexplainable. In regulated industries, Risk Officers block AI that can't explain decisions.

The insight: explainability is a systems architecture problem, not a model problem.

Event sourcing provides the audit trail. Every decision records the exact system state at the time it was made—proving causality, not just showing logs.

Developer productivity: governance through tooling

Junior developers using generic coding assistants often write incorrect patterns faster. The grocer needs governance built into development.

They're adopting Axoniq Development Agent, which scaffolds a correct event sourcing structure in 80% of the time. Developers define business logic, and the agent handles architectural plumbing. Every microservice starts with a governed foundation, and mid-level engineers can onboard faster without heavy senior oversight.

Data access: making events queryable

The grocer's data team faces a common problem: event stores are operationally powerful but hard to query. Extracting insights requires custom code or complex ETL pipelines.

Axoniq Insights Agent changes this. It sits between data analysts and the event store, translating natural-language questions into SQL queries against the entire event history.

"Show me all shipments from Supplier X that were rejected in Q4" becomes an instant query—no data engineering required! The data team gets self-service access to complete operational history without building extraction pipelines.

By consolidating fragmented DIY infrastructure into a unified event-sourcing platform, the grocer is transforming a nine-month delay into a competitive advantage: systems that regulators trust, developers can scale, and the business can pivot in weeks.