The Co-operative Group: Life in the Fast Checkout Lane

MANCHESTER, England — Jan. 16, 2012 — In the 19th century, cutting-edge retail technology consisted of nickel-plated cash registers with mechanical levers controlling hundreds of pins and springs to ring up transactions. A slab of marble on the front offered the rudimentary "business intelligence" of knowing whether coins were counterfeit by the sounds they made when tapped against it.

Although its roots may stretch back to that bygone era, today the Manchester, U.K.-based Co-operative Group Ltd. (Co-Op) has taken the point of sale (POS) a bit farther. Operating across a diverse array of industries from banking to funeral services, the Co-Op’s chain of more than 5,000 retail stores is well known throughout the British Isles.

Technology consultant Lawrence Freeman works with the Co-Op to design, build and implement the POS systems that power the popular stores. Based entirely on the Windows Embedded platform, Freeman’s system is called In Control Enterprise. The POS system (In Front) and enterprise handheld devices (In Hand) are built on the Windows Embedded POSReady and Windows Embedded Compact platforms, respectively.

"They’re not nickel-plated, but we deliver everything from the tills and point-of-sale terminals and mobile devices such as inventory scanners to back-office applications for analytics, administration, ordering and cash management," Freeman says.

Freeman says the system is currently deployed throughout the Co-Op chain, more than 16,000 retail lanes in the U.K. In terms of Windows Embedded-based devices, roughly 30,000 are in use in the stores. On average, the entire system processes about 200 million pounds sterling per week.

That kind of volume results in a potential goldmine of information, and the In Control system offers an array of administrative and analytics functions to put all that data to work. By integrating the entire POS system through a data warehouse built on SQL Server, the Co-Op has connected its stores into an intelligent system that goes well beyond handling transactions and managing stores.

The system makes use of the SQL Server 2008 R2 reporting services to slice and dice customer and product data generated by POS systems and handheld devices. Besides offering the big-picture view of how stores are trending, the system is able to dial all the way down to individual transactions and customers.

"It’s really the lowest level of granularity one could hope for," says Freeman. "It’s down to each basket — what the customer bought, when they bought it, what they bought it with. Were they a member or not? How did they pay? How frequently do they go back?"

Freeman says the Co-Op runs Excel-based analysis engines over the top of its data to look for patterns in shopping behavior and make targeted offers to repeat customers, a process he calls “basket building."

"If a customer is spending 27 pounds with us a month, the next time they arrive in our store it might target them with a coupon that says spend 30, save three pounds," he says. "So we do get quite smart with the data we collect."

In addition to all the trading functionality expected in a retail system, the Co-Op’s Windows Embedded-based POS terminals include features for card processing, handling concessional goods like cell-phone top-offs, and tracking for the group’s 6 million loyalty members.

Freeman says the ability of Windows Embedded to connect to a range of technologies has also allowed the Co-Op to include higher-level management software into its handheld devices, freeing store managers from their PCs. On the store floors, mobile applications embedded into handheld units perform functions such as price checking, monitoring gaps on store shelves, counting stock, and reviewing orders and cashing out tills. All these data streams could potentially be tapped into.

"We really like to mobilize the store and get the store manager out in front of the customer," Freeman says. "So we put systems in place to enable that and bring a lot of back-office functionality to the manager on the handheld."

Being a retail system, availability is a key concern — and a key reason Freeman says his group chose to work with the Windows platform 12 years ago.

"Our reputation is built upon the fact that our systems trade constantly," he says. "The prospect of our system being down is just unthinkable, so we very much wanted the small footprint offered by Windows Embedded, and all the known quantities of working with the Windows platform."

The decision has worked well for Freeman, and his company has followed the Windows Embedded journey ever since.

"Windows Embedded gives us a framework that is abstracted away from the hardware, which allows for immense speed to market," he says. "And the ability to tie into the broader Windows platform lets us continually build functionality to engage our customers individually and intelligently."

For Freeman and 5,000-plus Co-Op stores across Britain, it’s all part of life in the fast lane.

To read more about how The Co-operative Group is successfully using Windows Embedded technology, see this new case study from Microsoft.

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