Co-op drives efficiency and innovation with a strategic partnership, Zühlke

Partnership overview:

A dedicated team of engineers, cross-discipline consulting services, and innovation workshops drive scalability and operational efficiency.
Streamlining of Co-op's engineering operations enables the efficient delivery of critical business projects.
Partnership with Zühlke helps Co-op optimise an ecommerce platform, stabilise a smart POS, automate inventory management, and create a POC for a cashless store.

Growing demand for quality engineering and innovation experts

Co-op is one of the largest consumer co-operatives in the world, owned by millions of members and employing almost 70,000 people. The company is the UK’s fifth biggest food retailer with over 2,500 stores. Additionally, Co-op is the UK’s largest funeral services provider, a major general insurer, and legal services business.

Co-op’s engineering team is responsible for providing high-quality support, maintenance, and development across a wide range of applications in the various business units.

The company was going through an exciting growth phase and its engineering team saw an increase in demand for its support across the business. The team needed to flex its internal capabilities and capacity to deal with peaks in demand while enhancing quality and keeping a control on costs.

Source: The Co-op Group (*)

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.

Learn more about our partnership

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.

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 define the optimal team structure.

Once the team structure and necessary skillsets were identified, we set about filling the required 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.

' We had an ambition that you would ‘check your badge at the door’ so nobody would be able to tell if an engineer was from Co-op or Zühlke. That’s exactly what we’ve achieved and why the partnership has been so successful! '

Gary Wardley

Head of Engineering & Foundation Services, Co-op

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.

' The best part of working with Zühlke has been the people. They’ve come in eager to engage, bringing fresh, innovative ideas, and showing a strong commitment to delivering value to Co-op. '

Sarah Miles

Principal Delivery Manager, Co-op

Time saved and reduced overheads have streamlined Co-op's engineering operations, allowing them to innovate and 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.