U.S.M.H Implements New Relic for 'Scan&Go' App with 580,000 Users, Accelerating Issue Resolution

New Relic, the observability platform for digital businesses, announced that United Super Markets Holdings (U.S.M.H) has successfully implemented the New Relic platform to improve the service experience of its 'Scan&Go' smartphone payment application. Available at over 500 stores in the Tokyo metropolitan area, the app has benefited from the resolution of previously untraceable issues, further driving retail digital transformation.

U.S.M.H is Japan's largest food supermarket consortium, generating over 1 trillion JPY in revenue with 763 stores across the capital region under brands such as Maruetsu, Kasumi, Inageya, and Aeon Food Style. Launched in 2022, the 'Scan&Go' app allows customers to scan product barcodes with their smartphones, apply coupons, and checkout seamlessly without lining up at the register. The service is highly popular and currently utilized by over 580,000 users.

Previously, U.S.M.H faced challenges due to its application development vendor and infrastructure vendor using entirely different monitoring tools for the Scan&Go system. This fragmentation led to the '4-hour problem,' where application processing delays were detected, but the root cause remained unidentified for four hours before the service management department was notified. To maintain system stability and provide a consistently smart shopping experience, U.S.M.H integrated New Relic in June 2025.

The decision to adopt New Relic was driven by its technical, operational, and cost benefits. First, it offered the convenience of acquiring necessary system telemetry data through simple implementation without complex setups. Second, the platform provided a unified dashboard enabling real-time data sharing across application vendors, infrastructure teams, service management, and engineering support. Additionally, New Relic's straightforward licensing model, based on user count and data volume, proved highly advantageous. It allows the company to seamlessly scale servers during busy supermarket seasons without additional contract procedures.

Through New Relic, U.S.M.H has advanced its Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) activities. The team has deepened its system monitoring approach through four perspectives: observing routine data to catch early warning signs, monitoring real-time user experiences like API response times, diagnosing root causes at the code level using APM upon receiving alerts, and nursing the system by executing continuous improvement cycles based on factual data. These efforts effectively eradicated the '4-hour problem' and significantly reduced investigation workloads. They also successfully identified and patched bugs specific to certain OS versions.

Taiyo Shinkawa, Manager of the EA Control Group, Engineering Department, Digital Headquarters at U.S.M.H, commented: 'New Relic not only stabilizes our systems and services but also has the potential to provide valuable data from a business perspective. For example, by utilizing data on items customers scanned but ultimately decided not to buy—information invisible to standard POS systems—we can deliver fresher insights to frontline operations. Going forward, we plan to apply observability to other systems connected to Scan&Go, enriching our customers' lives further.'