Case study · Retail · ESL · Scan&Go
Retail chain — five processes, 1.46 M PLN yearly benefit
- yearly operating benefit
- 1,46 mln zł
- hours saved on price changes
- 900 h/rok
- Scan&Go payback
- 8 mies.
- price match after go-live
- 100%
A supermarket with 50 staff and 8 858 price labels spent hundreds of hours a year on manual updates. The AiP Audit found five critical processes and a three-budget architecture. Result: 1.46 M PLN yearly benefit and an 8-month Scan&Go payback.
Context
A store in a supermarket chain on the Polish retail market, 50 staff, full assortment from groceries to seasonal goods. Systems before the audit: a HQ POS/goods system (controlled remotely by the chain), a separate HR/ops platform, and the chain’s promotion ledger. Local payroll used a classic Polish ERP. Every system needed data moved by hand. No integration layer.
The hard technology constraint: the HQ POS/goods system was controlled by the chain board, so local changes were out. Every automation had to run around it, not inside it. That defined the whole architecture.
Industry: Retail, supermarket format. Size: 50 staff, 8 858 price labels. AiP Audit variant: Growth Platinum.
Challenge
The store process map showed five areas where hand work ate hours and produced errors.
First, shelf price changes. HQ sent a weekly file of new prices; IT imported it by hand into the POS/goods system, printed labels by department, and staff swapped them product by product. One price action on 8 858 products took the team 3–4 hours a week. Lean/Six Sigma found all eight MUDA waste types here.
Second, B2B order handling. Business customers ordered by phone, email or SMS with no standard format. The manager built a product list by hand, assigned staff, and after picking entered the order into the POS/goods system after the fact. A full cycle (phone to delivery) took from a few hours to a full working day.
Third: work schedules for 50 people. Paper slips with staff requests collected by the 20th of the month, manual Excel planning, manager approval, and actual hours entered into Symfonia by the 10th of the next month.
Fourth — data integration between POS/goods, the HR/ops platform, ERP and promotions — the foundation without which the first three areas only gave partial savings. Fifth — customer shopping experience: checkout queues, shelf price errors, no information on product availability.
Estimate before the audit: 900–1 000 hours a year lost on hand work that raised neither margin nor service quality.
Approach
01 — Scoring of five TOP processes. In the first audit month we scored five critical processes on QA10’s model. Price changes scored 7.9 out of 10 (highest automation potential), schedules 7.7, B2B handling 7.55, data integration 7.5, customer shopping fifth as a strategic process. The dependency matrix showed data integration as the centre of the architecture.
02 — Three architecture variants per process. For each of the five processes we designed three variants: low budget, mid budget, enterprise. Each with CAPEX, yearly OPEX, payback and yearly benefit. The client got a 15-option matrix and decided per process, not as a block. QA10 recommendation: mid budget for price changes, Scan&Go and data integration; low budget for schedules and B2B.
03 — Implementation recommendation.
- Price changes: ESL + RPA automation for HQ file import. CAPEX 918 K PLN, 900 hours saved a year, yearly benefit 301–364 K PLN.
- Work schedules: dedicated SaaS with a mobile app. Cost 16.8 K PLN year 1, 70% time cut.
- B2B orders: form + automation engine + task manager. Cost 7.3 K PLN year 1, 331 hours saved a year.
- Scan&Go: 20 trolleys with screens + payments + WiFi 6E + beacons. CAPEX 574.5 K PLN, combined benefit 1.465 M PLN a year.
- Data integration: middleware with RPA bots linking all four areas.
04 — 18-month implementation plan. The audit closed with a three-phase plan: data integration (months 1–4), price and schedule automation (5–10), Scan&Go and full B2B (11–18). Each phase has an intermediate ROI so the client can see the effect before the next one.
Stack
Price changes sit on electronic shelf labels (ESL) — 8 858 e-ink labels, a central management server, RF controllers and a middleware layer. An enterprise-class RPA platform runs the price-file import; dedicated middleware joins the HQ POS/goods system to the ESL platform. For schedules: a workforce-management SaaS with a native mobile app and RFID terminals. Integration with local ERP through a dedicated connector. For B2B, the low-budget stack: SaaS form, task manager, flow engine. Scan&Go on smart trolleys with touch screens, weight sensors and a payment module. All inter-system traffic goes through middleware with TLS 1.3 and VLAN segmentation.
Results
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Combined yearly business benefit | 1.46 M PLN |
| Manual work cut on price changes (4h → 15 min/cycle) | 900 h/year |
| Payback for the Scan&Go module | 8 months |
| System prices matching shelf prices | 100% |
| Manual load cut in B2B handling (331h → 66h a year) | 80% → 15% |
| Hand-swapped labels after full ESL | 8 858 → 0 |
The largest value in this project did not come from one module, but from mutual reinforcement across all five. Data integration became the centre the other three automations drew effective savings from. If the client had shipped only Scan&Go without integration, the module would sit isolated from POS/goods and savings would be about 40% lower. That is the lesson we give every new retail client: automating a single process without a data layer always under-returns the investment.