INDUSTRY
Retail
Omnichannel CX and Intelligent Innovation – The Future of Retail
Services
Consulting
TCS Consulting Services to Achieve Success in the Digital Era
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, increase operational efficiency, and drive better supplier collaboration.
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Overview
The Co-operative (Co-op) 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, dealing in 55,000 products and servicing 1,700 wholesale customers.
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.
Challenge
In 2020, the Co-op Group initiated a business process automation program as part of their long-term strategic initiatives for transformation-led growth.
The retailer 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 their systems were relatively old, with lots of different applications added through various acquisitions and mergers over the years.
Due to a high number of legacy systems, data synchronization was a challenge, which made it difficult to retrieve information, hampering the delivery of services. The systems were rather inefficient and highly 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-op Group collaborated with TCS to implement a scalable model to modernize the IT landscape.
TCS successfully completed IT modernization at over 40 franchise stores of The Co-op Group, laying the groundwork for further rollout at the remaining over 250 franchise stores. Legacy systems were sunset, and the retail business was modernized with greenfield implementation of SAP ERP solution.
The franchise stores were equipped with:
- 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 and 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.
By 2022, The Co-op Group had rolled out the SAP system across 2,600 stores in the UK. At this time, TCS, along with stakeholders from the client’s team started thinking about a stabilization and performance improvement strategy for the system. This would help ensure robust and seamless delivery of services, especially during the holiday season when sales peak.
As part of the stabilization strategy, we focused on:
- System stability: Implementing SAP technical performance improvement recommendations and enforcing performance volume testing as part of all upgrades and patches
- Shift left and automation: Creating reconciliation reports, ensuring standard operation procedure- (SOP) based recovery, developing sanity check guides
- Operational rigor and assurance: Conducting weekly major incident mock up drills, organizing major incident management team meeting refreshers, and conducting peak sales period preparation eight weeks prior
- Enhanced visibility: Conducting daily recon report run and fix, setting up ops dashboard and internal war rooms
- Business enablement and ownership: Creating order journey ops dashboard, enforcing data setup cut off during the peak, planning for peak readiness and daily catch ups
- Process harmonization: Conducting regular independent center of excellence reviews of application managed services to further align with best practices
Benefits
With TCS modernizing their IT landscape, The Co-op Group is equipped with advanced forecasting capabilities.
Partnering with TCS has helped The Co-op Group:
- Improve on-shelf availability
- Drive efficient operations
- Ensure strong supplier collaboration
The new platform enables end-to-end tracking of all terms of trade with vendors and has introduced unparalleled promotions and price modelling platform transparency to track actual retained margins.
It has also brought in forecasting and replenishment models, which use complex and accurate calculations for store business orders based on SAP’s forecasting module. New customized implementation has reduced wastage at stores and unified scheduling platform for future, time-based business orders and deliveries.
Additionally, TCS’ system stabilization strategy has ensured smooth operations for the retailer. The Co-op Group achieved 99.5% in-store availability and zero hours of trading loss during the last holiday season, with a whopping 96% success in batch processing.