The Co-Operative Group has been working with Syncsort to significantly slash their batch processing times for store replenishment. A strategy that will help the firm save more than £12 million a year while maintaining its ethical stance.

Following its 2009 acquisition of 600 Somerfield stores, The Co-op saw an opportunity to streamline operations by centralising its store replenishment process.

Previously, The Co-op relied on the experience of its store managers for daily replenishment orders. However, relying on those thoughtful hunches created unpredictable stock outages and overages that the organisation needed to reduce or eliminate.

Each Co-operative Group store manages more than 180 food categories, with each consisting of approximately 100 individual line items. Across 2,800 stores this is 54 million planograms – an enormous volume of data needing processing.

With Syncsort’s DMExpress solution the retailer can achieve huge volumes of processing on time for all of its stores on the same day they need them — not 24 hours later.

Having that data in each store at the start of their trading day means store managers are continually aligned with the absolutely latest data, promotions, and trends. When the batch processing window closes, the planograms can be viewed and acted upon locally at the stores, while still being hosted centrally.

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