Co-op | Supporting retail and supply chain activities with a modern B2B integration approach

B2Bi is supporting retail and supply chain activities for leading organizations around the world. Co-op is the number one convenience food retailer in the UK with about 2,500 stores owned by its members. Co-op is using Axway B2B Integration, to support retail activities from inventory to route planning for the lorries. B2Bi is critical for Co-op: 500 individual flows are configured in B2Bi today supporting around 3,000 endpoints and processing around 1 million messages/day across the application.

Co-op is the number one convenience food retailer in the UK, with about 2500 stores. We are owned by members, who give back to the communities that we operate in.

The main pillar that relates to integration is that we are aiming to implement a composable business. That means smaller microservices API enabled microservices. Integration is going to be a really important part of that, not just the APIs, but more of our B2Bis and MFTs as well where APIs aren't suitable.

We are using B2Bi, Axway Secure Transport, Sentinel for monitoring, API gateway. The main business cases for B2Bi are retail focused, supporting everything from inventory to route planning for the lorries, supplier invoicing, you name it, and B2Bi covers it for retail basically.

We have around I think 500 individual flows configured in B2Bi today. They support around 3000 end points, and we process around a million messages a day across the application. B2Bi is critical for the Co-op, especially in its retail organization. If B2Bi went down or we turned off tomorrow, we would have no businesses, it’s as simple as that.

The benefits of B2Bi especially are its maturity. Axway have been playing in the integration space for a long time, and it shows in its products. We've assessed all the integration products, and they don't do things quite as well as B2Bi does we’ve found. The kind of the maturity of the products says it all.

The partnership with Axway is good, when we’ve worked together on the B2Bi 2.6 migration project, that has been a definite partnership. Both sides, I feel, have gained from that. We've helped Axway to form a path on how to deliver that technology, so it's definitely a partnership. We both get something from it.

The future steps with Axway... as mentioned, we're aiming to implement a composable business. So API enablement, so it may be that we take a look at the API management platform, definitely something we need to do. We've looked at Amplify Integration, which looks really interesting to help deliver our operating model... of product teams building and support in their own integrations.

B2Bi and Secure Transport will be around for a long time, simply because we connect to things that aren't API enabled, so we will need something else in that space.

Learn about how companies like Co-op are using Axway B2B Integration