Quality data of over 1,200 shops at a glance

Coop is the second biggest retail trade group in Switzerland. Close to the customer and organised into five sales districts, coop supports over 1,200 shops and has a team of over 44,000 employees. Coop is eligible for being the best and most customer-oriented retail trader in Switzerland. In the fields of ecological and fair-trade products coop is clear market leader. In order to keep this market position in the long term and continually improve it, Coop considers efficient internal quality inspections as crucial factors of success.

Initial situation

Basically, all internal audits of the Coop shops, restaurants and dispatching centres (approx. 1,200) should be carried out with this system. An important requirement for Coop was to have an integrated user-friendly IT-solution with decentralised access capabilities for handling the audits. This should include the administration of checklists, planning and assignment of audits as well as the electronically recording of inspection results. The data administration should enable the paperless filing of internal and external inspection reports, certificates and further audit documents.
Comprehensive analysis options should guarantee benchmarking over different steps and provide the basis for creating measures for systematic quality improvements.

Realisation

The implementation of Ecert enables to cover the manifold needs as the data base is user-friendly and multi-lingual. Thanks to interfaces to the central business software SAP the master data of the inspected Coop branches can be transferred. The current up-dates of adress data, responsibilities and product line data are conducted automatically.
In the meantime nine standards (checklists) e.g. checks of shops, suppliers and pronto shops are included in four languages. According to the product line data only questions that are relevant for the inspected shop are displayed on the checklists in order to allow the inspector to work efficiently. After that the results can be analysed in different steps and enable the shop to compare with the national standard or the sales district regarding checklist, checkpoint, category etc.
Benchmarking enables to set systematic measures for quality improvement in each store and adopt the means in an optimal way.

Andreas Dörr, Coop Quality centre
“Thanks to Ecert we can analyse our inspection results in an optimal way. For this reason the benchmarking between the shops is possible only now and we can create effective measures out of that. Our shops, restaurants and dispatching centres are more than ever motivated for self-monitoring.”