The Swiss Coop Cooperative is one of the largest and most well-known retail and wholesale companies in Europe. With 2.6 million members, the cooperative is more closely linked to its customers than almost any other company. The anchoring of sustainability is not only reflected in organic quality, but also in comprehensive commitment to people, animals and nature.
For a trading company of this size, the smooth exchange of messages along the supply chain is critical to success. When exchanging via X.400 (an important network for the food trade in Europe) routing and onboarding must be efficient and cost-effective. This is why the Coop cooperative approached ecosio.
- Routing of all X.400 connections
and consolidation to a single fully managed EDI connection over AS2 - Bundling other VAN connections
and protocols via ecosio, e.g. GXS, AS2, HTTPS, SFTP etc. - Cost reduction and international connection
X.400 per-message costs lower, plus secure connection of international partners - Proactive 24/7 monitoring and troubleshooting
through ecosio and the possibility of a full text search in all documents
– Paul Wandl
Head of Onboarding Project
Since Coop had previously relied on its own X.400 mailbox for electronic data exchange, the routing effort and costs were higher than necessary. However, the X.400 network is particularly important for both suppliers and customers.
For a company with a supply chain of this size, this inevitably led to a complicated and expensive X.400 landscape.
As an EDI service provider with an extensive network and interconnects to various VANs, ecosio was tasked with reducing the cost and effort of the numerous X.400 connections across the entire group. Ultimately, the handling of a single central AS2 connection to ecosio proved to be so advantageous for Coop that the routing of other protocols or other partners was also handed over to ecosio.
