Overview

The Co-operative Group is one of the world's largest consumer co-operatives.

Owned by more than eight-million members, it is the UK's fifth-biggest food retailer. They operate 13 distribution centers and more than 2,600 stores, and deal with 55,000 products and 1,700 wholesale customers.

Challenge

The Co-operative Group initiated a business process automation program as part of their long-term strategic initiatives for growth through transformation.

The Co-operative Group wanted to do away with legacy platforms and modernize the IT landscape with robust JDA and SAP retail solutions at over 2,000 stores.

Most of The Co-op Group's systems were relatively old, with lots of different applications added through various acquisitions and mergers over the years.

A lot of time was spent keying and finding information, and this got in the way of delivering services to partners. Due to a high number of legacy systems, data synchronization was a challenge and became highly inefficient and expensive to maintain. There were, for instance, more than 90 legacy systems with over 2,000 interfaces that made them unwieldy. The business could no longer sustain this way of working, as it impacted efforts to improve customer and colleague experience.

Solution

The Co-operative Group collaborated with TCS to implement a rollable model to modernize the IT landscape.

The solution helped achieve complete modernization of over 40 selected franchise stores of The Co-op Group, laying the ground for its further rollout in the remaining over 250 franchise stores. Legacy systems were sunset, and the retail business was modernized with greenfield implementation of SAP ERP solution.

The solution provided the franchise stores:

• Advanced automated, multilevel forecast and replenishment capabilities

• Automation of ordering and replenishment processes

The solution had the right blend of inhouse applications for product and supplier introduction, JDA solution for range and space, and SAP solution bundle from ERP Central Component (ECC), Secure Network Communication (SNC), Forecasting and Replenishment (F&R), Customer Activity Repository (CAR), and Business Warehouse (BW).

This streamlined inventories along with the supply chain and helped lower overall inventory levels and cost while optimizing fulfilment rates. Legacy data synchronization was handled with SAP data migration tool during go-live and cutover.