Canadian grocery retailer Metro is deploying cloud technology from Japanese firm Fujitsu to monitor operations across all 500 of its stores.

The active process monitoring is based on Fujitsu’s proprietary operation and management technology. It will monitor Metro stores as well as its Super C and Food Basics banners. This deployment was preceded by a pilot in February this year, followed by a phased rollout.

The monitoring provides continuous oversight of all store transactions and offers immediate insights on potential thefts, frauds, policy breaches and operational inefficiencies. It integrates multiple data sources, including transaction data, loyalty data and security camera footage, providing a comprehensive view of store operations. Compliance checks using video are now extremely fast.

The technology is hosted in Canada and available in French and English.

“We are proud to partner with Metro to bring this innovation to the Canadian market,” said Takashi Harada, head of smart retail at Fujitsu. “The newly introduced active process monitoring will enable Metro to optimise its operations, ensure policy compliance and ultimately enhance the customer experience.”

The system was developed in co-creation with German retailers bringing experience and best practices to the project. Metro is the first Canadian customer for this technology, which already monitors 7000 to 8000 stores globally.

Early results from the pilot phase in 20 stores demonstrated promise by identifying losses in the first week. Additionally, it improved monitoring such as compliant use of the loyalty scheme at point of sale by reducing efforts.

“The impact of this implementation has been impressive,” said Marc Lapointe, senior director at Metro (corpo.metro.ca). “The combination of the refined system and our analysts’ experience is proving to be effective. We’re seeing interest from our operations teams, who are requesting demos to gain the unprecedented visibility into their cash lanes that this system provides. It’s a transformative experience for them.”

The commercial aspects of the project are being handled by Fujitsu in North America, with technical expertise provided by Fujitsu in Germany.

Fujitsu (global.fujitsu) has 113,000 employees and reported consolidated revenues of ¥3.6tn for the fiscal year ended March 2025.