Mark Hale, food retail IS director at Co-op, says the Epos project "marks a key step in the process of integration of the societies and the 'one business in one year' [integration] goal that we have set ourselves".

The investment is expected to result in several significant benefits to the organization's food retail business, including reduced operating costs and overheads, and the creation of a single communication process for all food store teams. But it's the notion of using the network to control distributed clients that is adding a tangible green business benefit.

The introduction of the 'Wake-up on LAN' program will enable tills, receipt printers, customer and operator screens, Chip and PIN authorization devices and barcode scanners to be switched off automatically when stores close and power up again the following morning.

Powering Ahead

As with many recent green projects, this is a scenario that would not even have been considered until quite recently. "The re-engineering of the Epos system so it can be shut down at night demonstrates how power has now become vital to the criteria of running a business, where a couple of years ago it wouldn't have even been on the radar," Hale says.

Hale says the introduction of the program will also prolong the life of the hardware, thereby reducing the environmental impact and cost base further by requiring less frequent equipment renewal.

"As well as enabling an ethical approach, there's also the financial implication," he adds. "For instance, evaluating the recent Epos developments in-store by a factor of 2200 becomes a big number. And we believe we can get longevity out of equipment because we're roughly taking a third out of its lifetime use."

The Co-op says it would save 1.68 million kilowatt hours of energy per annum by using the system, which has been developed by the group's in-house IT team in collaboration with IBM to re-engineer the InControl store end-of-day batch process system. Savings on its energy bills are expected to be around £120,000 a year along with a reduction of 722 tons of CO2. Implementation is expected to be complete this summer.