Coop Denmark, a giant of the Danish retail industry, operates in the competitive and fast-moving convenience sector. It has revenues of approximately DKK 50 billion (US $9.2 billion), employs 35,000 people, has more than 1.7 million members and operates through several brands including Kvickly, SuperBrugsen, Dagli’Brugsen and coop.dk.

As is common with many retailers, store staff were tied up in time-consuming and
expensive processes to manually manage shelf-edge pricing and promotions. To reduce this time and cost, and improve pricing accuracy, Coop Denmark looked for a more efficient way to manage these processes. It ultimately decided to deploy our Electronic Shelf Labels (ESLs).

Fast, efficient and accurate

The Kvickly Jyllinge store, located just north-west of Copenhagen, became the first outlet to install the labels. With the help of our partner, Delfi, over 12,000 ESLs were installed across the store in less than 48 hours. Using the labels Coop can change store prices and offers on any shelf, anywhere in seconds.

The Kvickly Jyllinge store reports a range of benefits. Staff no longer need to report early or work late to reprice shelves, allowing them to focus “more on merchandising and serving our customer better”, says Kresten Haubo, Warehouse Director.

In terms of promotions, the process is much quicker than before: if management needs to increase or decrease the price of a single product, or an entire range, it’s simply a case of updating the label templates on the server and sending the data over our easy-to-install, secure wireless network. Immediate price changes are particularly effective in reducing waste associated with perishable products. Prices can be reduced throughout the day for items such as milk, helping to ensure all stock is sold by the end of the day. Commenting on this, Kresten Haubo observes: “Instead of disposing of remaining stock at the end of the day, and wasting money, we can instead sell it at a reduced cost. This just makes good business sense.”

Other key benefits include the fact that labels can display inventory levels, to help staff manage replenishment more effectively, and the accuracy of pricing means that queues at customer services to query pricing have disappeared.

Cost Savings

Ultimately, the introduction of electronic shelf labels means that management of Coop Denmark can focus on merchandising and serving customers better. It expects overall cost savings in staff time to be around 600,000 DKK (US $104,000) a year with a corresponding increase in sales revenue due to the better stock management and improved customer service. We’ll leave the last word to Kresten Haubo who concludes: “There are so many other possibilities we can explore with the technology that we haven’t even touched on yet. But, for now, it saves us so much time…time that we can put to good use elsewhere in our store.”

The complete case study can be read here.