How East of England Co-op integrated prompted markdowns with ESELs

We are thrilled to announce that we have successfully added electronic shelf edge label (ESEL) integration into our WasteInsight solution to further enhance labor productivity for East of England Co-op.

As the largest independent retailer operating in the East of England, the Co-operative provides food stores and specialist services, such as funerals, security, travel agents and petrol filling stations to communities across Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk & Cambridgeshire.

Like most retailers, East of England Co-op are regularly looking for opportunities to improve store operations and labor productivity. ESELs present a very real opportunity to do just that given the ease of which information can be displayed and updated. 

East of England Co-op currently have ESELs installed across 18 stores and will be rolling out to all food stores within 12 months, we have developed functionality within our WasteInsight product to ensure that we can help them make the most out of this technology. 

"This is a really exciting step for us as it demonstrates how flexible and scalable our data led solution can be," said Kieran O'Brien, UK Client Director, Retail Insight. "The work we are doing with ESEL integration across the East of England Co-op estate will ensure that we can drastically reduce the amount of time store associates spend looking for products to be marked down."

Through our cloud-based solution, we currently deliver better expiration management and smarter markdowns through our Prompted and Dynamic Markdown features. Our Prompted Markdown feature is where the integration has been prioritised and when a store associate is served with an alert to find a product to mark down they can interact with their hand-held terminal to cause the ESEL to flash.

Not only does this drastically reduce the time needed for product identification, but it also enables East of England Co-op to get more out of their CapEx technology investment, ensuring greater ROI.

"We are thrilled to have successfully piloted the integration between our ESELs and Retail Insight's Prompted Markdown solution," said Robert Hawkins, Senior Project Manager, East of England Co-op. "As we roll out across our estate, we are confident that we will continue to reap the rewards of streamlined processes, and we are excited to get feedback from our store colleagues."

The beauty of the integration is in its simplicity. Because our solution works with a retailer's foundational data, it is product agnostic which means that it can work with any ESEL model, and is fully scalabe across a retailer's estate. 

We have been working with East of England Co-op since 2021 and are helping them to improve product availability with AvailabilityInsight and reduce food waste across their estate with WasteInsight. 

Our ESEL integration was piloted within two East of England Co-op store and is scheduled to be rolled out across all ESEL-equipped stores by September 2024, and will be immediately available to ESEL stores as they come on stream. We are looking forward to extending this functionality to our other clients that currently leverage WasteInsight.

If you would like to find out more about how we integrate with ESELs you can visit our WasteInsight product page. Equally if you would like to explore more of our products, you can do so here.