Co-op boosts engineering capacity by 25% to unlock scalability and speed up product delivery

Partnership overview:

• A dedicated team of engineers, cross-discipline consulting services, and innovation workshops drive scalability and cost savings.

• Lead time to fill engineering roles reduced by 30%, with a mixture of dedicated and flexible roles filled by Zühlke’s experts.

• Partnership with Zühlke helps Co-op’s engineering team enhance quality and achieve delivery excellence while controlling costs.

However, the UK’s software engineering talent market was extremely competitive, presenting Co-op with numerous challenges, including high costs and difficulties for finding, hiring, and retaining talent. In some cases, vacant roles remained unfilled for over a year.

Additionally, relying solely on a permanent workforce posed various business risks while managing multiple external suppliers led to significant overhead and inconsistencies.

Co-op’s Head of Engineering, Gary Wardley, chose to partner with Zühlke after evaluating several suppliers because of our successful collaboration on the product roadmap of the Co-op Funeralcare website and supporting systems.

Embracing a strategic partnership to deliver lasting value

‘We began our partnership with Zühlke in the Funeralcare space. This collaboration revealed our similar ways of working and a shared understanding of quality engineering. So, we knew that evolving our relationship into a true partnership, rather than a supplier-contractor dynamic, would bring mutual benefits and be quite frictionless,’ says Gary Wardley, Head of Engineering & Foundation Services at Co-op.

To empower Co-op’s engineering team with the flexibility to adjust its resources and access a wide-ranging pool of experts in software engineering, data and AI, cloud technologies, and more – we proposed a ‘dedicated engineering team’ approach.

Benefits of the dedicated team model

The dedicated team model is designed to address the unique long-term needs of an organisation with a tailored and seamlessly integrated team of engineers from a trusted partner. For Co-op, this model provided support across various products and services with the flexibility to scale capacity up or down as needed.

Creating a thriving partnership

From the outset, we jointly assessed the skills and experiences required for the engineering projects within Co-op, enabling us to outline the optimal team structure. During the ramp-up period, we made sure to meet the immediate demand for engineers with our flexible nearshore specialists.

Once the team structure and necessary skillsets were identified, we swiftly filled the required engineering roles. This allowed Co-op’s team to leverage international experts and continue effectively supporting the entire business with its technical needs.

To enable a seamless onboarding process and smooth collaboration between the dedicated team and Co-op's stakeholders, we established a strong governance structure to track overall progress and ensure Co-op’s needs were being met.

Specifically, our engineers worked jointly with Co-op's specialists on the following areas of the business:

• Ecommerce platform: optimisation of the Co-op website and app, minimising application downtime and lowering operational costs.
• Partnership platform: integration with UberEats and Deliveroo to streamline the shopping process.
• Smart point-of-sale system: web system upgrade to improve reliability, predictability, and stability, ensuring critical till operations and confidence in future deployments.
• Inventory management: automation of tasks, implementation of new features, and set up of pipelines for importing live data, resulting in cost savings, a significant reduction in administrative work, and lower stock leakage.
• Frictionless stores: in just four months, the joint team of Co-op and Zühlke specialists took a POC for a cashless store from a concept to the first working frictionless shop, allowing colleagues to just walk-in, pick-up products, and simply walk out thanks to automatic payments.
• Unified commerce platform: ensuring smooth operation of the Azure-based platform crucial for developing Co-op retail applications.
• Digital experience for members: implementing an efficient member registration process, resolving third-party issues, and delivering pipeline templates to minimise engineering efforts and increase repeatability.

Partnership value: going beyond a ‘client-supplier’ relationship

Our partnership with Co-op has evolved far beyond a traditional client-supplier relationship. By effectively embedding ourselves within Co-op’s team and aligning closely with their goals, we've established a true strategic partnership.

As a result of our collaboration, Co-op's ability to fill an engineering role with the required quality and experience has significantly increased, while the lead time to do this has drastically reduced. Previously, it took an average of 100 days to fill an engineering position at Co-op, but with our support, this time was cut by 30%.

Time saved and reduced overheads have streamlined Co-op's engineering operations, allowing them to deliver critical business projects more efficiently. With our partnership underpinning 25% of the company’s engineering needs, Co-op can plan for the future confidently and ambitiously. 

We are thrilled to continue our partnership with Co-op and keep delivering value to its members, employees, and customers.

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(*) "Co-op opening in Rochdale" by The Co-op Group / CC by 2.0.

(**) "Co-op tote bag" by The Co-op Group / CC by 2.0.