East of England Co-op, the largest independent retailer in the East of England with a £385m turnover and a broad portfolio of businesses—including food stores, funeral services, security, property and travel—has embarked on a data modernization journey. At the heart of this transformation is Darren Tuffs, the BI Developer and team lead, whose technical development work and team training have helped modernize the East of England Co-op’s use of data across departments
THE CHALLENGE
The travel division of East of England Co-op, consisting of 25 branches, had long struggled with fragmented and unreliable destination data. Their booking system, nearly 20 years old, allowed agents to input destinations using unstructured free-text fields. This resulted in entries ranging from “JFK” to “cream tea for two,” with no enforced data standards or validation. A cascade of patchwork solutions followed—Excel spreadsheets with nested VLOOKUPs and Google Sheets meant to interpret and correct these entries. This system lacked scalability, introduced human error, and ultimately provided limited visibility into travel trends.
Adding to the complexity, frontline staff had no access to their legacy BI tool, WebFOCUS, which in itself was challenged in that it was difficult to use and resulted in very poor user adoption— leaving decision-making hampered by inaccessible or inaccurate data. Darren and his team recognized that a complete overhaul was necessary to move from reactive fixes to proactive insights.
The East of England team went through a full RFI and RFP process. Two vendors eventually made the shortlist, and at the end, Pyramid was chosen.
“The thing about Pyramid Analytics that stood out was the partnership – we are a partnership business and put great value on that, and it has really shone with Pyramid. They did an excellent job of addressing our needs and talking to us and helping us really make the right decision”, said East of England Co-op’s Technology Officer, Rob Smith.
