INDUSTRY
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Retail
Omnichannel Experience & Intelligent – The Future of Retail
HIGHLIGHTS
- The Co-operative Group, one of the world’s largest consumer co-operatives owned by more than eight million members, is the UK’s fifth-biggest food retailer with over 2,500 stores.
- As part of its transformation plan, the group modernized most of its key legacy platforms with robust SAP retail solutions.
- The group partnered with TCS for innovative use of technology to improve on-shelf availability of products and operational efficiency, and to drive better supplier collaboration.
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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.
Benefits
The solution empowered The Co-op Group with advanced forecasting capabilities.
Partnering with TCS for innovative use of technology helped The Co-op Group:
Improve on-shelf availability
Provide more efficient operations
Drive better supplier collaboration
The new platform enabled end-to-end tracking of all terms of trade with vendors and introduced unparalleled promotions and price modelling platform transparency to track actual retained margins.
It also brought in forecasting and replenishment models, which used complex and accurate calculations for store business orders based on SAP’s forecasting module. New customized implementation reduced wastage at stores and unified scheduling platform for future, time-based business orders and deliveries.
The Co-op Group aims to focus on driving B2B revenue, thereby growing top line to about $1 billion (about £800 million) in three years.
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