How Carrefour Cut Time to Market in Half with GitLab
As one of the world’s largest retailers, Carrefour relies on software to run critical retail operations every day, from online grocery to in-store checkout. With thousands of stores, complex logistics networks, and rapidly growing e-commerce operations, the company’s ability to innovate digitally is central to its long-term success. By standardizing on GitLab as the foundation of a unified software factory, Carrefour transformed software delivery from a fragmented, tool-heavy environment into a scalable, seamless and secure platform that accelerates innovation.
Olivier Gibert, Group Chief Technology Officer, Carrefour Carrefour’s mission to become a digital retail company requires treating software engineering as a core business capability. Digital now shapes how the company designs, delivers, and operates the day to day customer experience, from e-commerce to stores and retail operations. This means faster improvements to online grocery, more digital experiences in stores, and reliable & predictable operations across digital and physical channels.
As Carrefour invested in digital capabilities across all business areas, teams adopted tools and practices that best fit their local needs. Over time, this diversity highlighted an opportunity to align delivery practices and improve visibility across teams and countries, especially from a security perspective.
Carrefour reorganized its software teams around digital factories, each aligned to a business domain such as e-commerce, supply chain, or stores. These digital factories own their products end-to-end, which allows teams to respond more quickly when something breaks or needs improvement, minimizing impact.
Supporting them with a centralized software factory built on GitLab provides shared tooling, standards, and metrics. Carrefour consolidated source code management, CI/CD, security, and metrics into a unified DevSecOps platform.
“We needed to enable every team to deliver consistently, without friction,” says Yohan Torjman, director of the Carrefour data platform and ex software factory director. “GitLab gives us a common way to build, test, secure, and deploy software, while still letting teams move fast.”
GitLab now supports around 17,000 repositories and 1,300 developers, powering systems across e-commerce, logistics, warehouses, and point-of-sale (PoS) environments. With GitLab, Carrefour cut the cost and effort required to maintain its fragmented environment by 50%. It also reduced platform support requests by 60%, even as the number of users and projects continued to grow.
Built-in automation and self-service reduced platform maintenance and support activities of more than 450 hours per month, while standardized tooling reduced developer onboarding from two to four days to just half a day. On mature teams, such as e-commerce, productivity has doubled.
“GitLab now sits at the heart of how we build and deliver software at Carrefour,” says Torjman. “It allows us to embed digital capabilities directly into the business, especially where customers interact with us.”
Embedding security directly into the development workflow was a critical part of the transformation. With GitLab, security scanning expanded from about 70 projects to all repositories by default, covering code, dependencies, licenses, and infrastructure.
“Once security is embedded in the pipeline, everyone is covered without exception,” says Guillaume Cécile, director of IT Security Operations. “The visibility we have today with GitLab is exceptional.”
Central dashboards provide a unified view across teams, while Carrefour’s Quality Engineering (QE) Score and TechScore measure code quality, test coverage, security, and technical compliance across more than 200 critical products. These metrics are used to establish team goals and incentives, helping them to continuously improve.
Carrefour translated those measurable insights into tangible business results. For teams who deploy software regularly such as e-commerce, the time from business request to production was cut in half, and its deployment cadence went from monthly to daily, a 30x increase in release frequency. Production incidents dropped by about 25%, while platform availability sits at 99.91%. Consolidation also reduced security team overhead by 60%, delivering more than $350,000 in annual savings on security tooling.
GitLab now underpins Carrefour’s most critical retail systems, including online grocery platforms, logistics and warehouse management, and in-store POS deployments. It also enabled Carrefour’s Git-to-Cloud model, creating an automated path from code commit to secure cloud deployment.
“This acceleration to the cloud would not have been possible without GitLab,” says Torjman. “It allowed us to modernize applications properly, not just lift and shift them.”
These improvements directly impact how customers experience Carrefour’s digital services, from how quickly new features appear to how reliably systems perform during peak demand.
With a unified software factory in place, Carrefour is now focused on extending these gains through AI-assisted development. Early experiments with GitLab Duo and agent-based workflows are already delivering results. Automated merge request reviews reduced review time from 20 to 40 minutes to under 5 minutes, with an acceptance rate of up to a 70% for AI-generated suggestions.
“The first thing we noticed with GitLab Duo is how much smoother the workflow became,” says Torjman. “Developers stay focused on creating value instead of waiting for reviews.”
Reducing friction for developers enables Carrefour to spend more time improving customer-facing features and less time on manual rework, accelerating innovation without compromising quality.
“GitLab fundamentally changed how our teams work together,” says Cécile. “Development, security, and operations now share the same language, the same platform, and the same way of working.”
