Published: Aug 11, 2025
NCS helps major national retailer with an app that supports Aussies enjoying the joy of food
A major national retail chain is making great progress optimising behind the-scenes processes that ensure quality produce and products for Australian customers.
This progress has come after technology roadblocks behind the scenes. Its people were striving to be efficient and productive, but were struggling with an in-store app experience that was highly fragmented, and not considered to be user-friendly.
An end-of-life fleet of handheld computers were being used by its staff that included many separate apps, contributing to a poor user experience and lengthy delays in various integral business processes. At scale, the impact of this technology stack was amplified, with disparate data leading to poor quality outputs and production delays, and impacting this major business’ capacity to innovate.
With plans to replace legacy devices with modernised handhelds, its team envisaged a greater project: modernising how its people worked by reviewing the software experience on these devices and taking purposeful steps to streamline its employees’ digital experiences.
Through a strategic app modernisation project, our client – which is a major national retailer – has realised its ambition. Partnering with NCS has been integral as our team have brought trusted expertise and capabilities to help them succeed.
What does the app offer?
The app offers a streamlined, single entry app experience for its Australian store employees to operate across all tech-supported business processes, from supply chain management and inventory to team scheduling and issues reporting.
Our client has significantly simplified its tech-enabled business processes through the app, with:
- new data and insights from stock and supply chain operations
- a faster, more efficient user experience
- vastly improved employee productivity across its stores.
The challenge
Our client focuses on helping its customers have shopping experiences that are convenient and enjoyable. Technology plays a critical role in helping its employees deliver on a mission to provide quality and convenience.
After recognising its earlier fleet of handheld computers required modernising, the team was determined its new app would be bulletproof. It wanted minimal downtime and disruption during development, and rapid deployment and delivery across its store network.
The project challenges were two-fold:
- developing a Microsoft-led solution within an enterprise and
- creating a Power App solution that until then, had never been attempted at the scale the client required.
The solution
A unified, single app experience
To prepare for a major move from a fragmented app experience to a unified, single app experience, a strong understanding of every use-case and business process the app needed to execute was critical to planning. This meant it wasn’t just technical stakeholders involved in development, but workforce operations experts and retail staff who could help identify where the speed of business could be improved and give insights into where the app would be used, and the level of personalisation required.
The app was designed to provide a unified app experience, with users able to log in and access their most-used applications easily, making every log-in more productive.
Hyperscaler expertise from a trusted partner – Google + Microsoft
The client needed a solution that leveraged their local technology (Google), with the ability to build fast for future application needs. App security and fast reliable user authentication was also key. The solution was Microsoft PowerApps, a low-code solution built for fast, iterative development that could work as platform for their app unification needs today, and in the days after tomorrow.
As both a Microsoft Solutions and Google Premier Partner, NCS brought deep technical capabilities combined with strong partner relationships to ensure the client’s complex but critical requirements could be integrated seamlessly across the two technology platforms.
When our client selected Microsoft Power Apps as the platform for its mobile computing fleet, it was chosen for its low-code development framework that would allow for future development, without the need for extensive programming knowledge. The platform would allow for continued app development that could streamline processes, automate workflows, and meet the wide and varied business requirements of consolidating what was previously many apps in a single experience.
NCS rose to the significant challenges: integrating Google and Microsoft systems and deploying the app at an unprecedented scale. Microsoft Power Apps had not yet supported a solution of the magnitude required. To meet this demand, NCS successfully collaborated with Microsoft to enhance Power Apps’ infrastructure, ensuring it could deliver the scalability and operational reliability needed to support the use of the app across the client’s stores.
The impact
The launch of this app has been highly successful. Outcomes have included an improved and personalised user experience to access and act on critical business processes, as well as considerable improvements to store-level employee experiences, simplifying a previously complex and clunky multi-app experience on a single device.
The integration of a Microsoft PowerApps solution in a Google enterprise also demonstrates a strong “best of breed” strategy where existing technology investments and alliances need to determine a business’s technology investments moving forwards too.
