Full gas ahead for Aldi Nord. Not only with returned empties.
One of the biggest rollouts ever managed by Wincor Nixdorf had been preceded by large-scale development work. Initially, Aldi wanted the Revendo 7000 reverse vending system to be made faster and then, in a next step, quieter. In order to generate higher revenue from the sale of the compressed bottles, the company also requested that material recognition technology be installed to differentiate between white and colored polyethylene terephthalate (PET) materials. Aldi assigned Wincor Nixdorf, its information technology partner of more than 20 years, the task of customizing all technologies to meet the retailer’s specific requirements.
The maxim at the Aldi Nord stores in Germany is the same for those in the Benelux countries as well as France, Spain and Denmark: Consumers should be able to buy top-quality groceries at bottom prices directly in their neighborhoods. With this strategy, the company’s founders, the Albrecht brothers, established a small grocery business in Essen after World War 2 and turned it into a global, highly respected discounter. In its home market, there’s almost no escaping Aldi. More than 85 percent of German consumers shop at the company’s huge nationwide chain of stores. Meanwhile, Aldi has become Germany’s largest wine merchant.
The Aldi principle is also reflected in the company’s use of IT. The company’s “top quality at bottom prices” strategy means systems have to pay for themselves over their entire life cycles, and they have to be ‘thin’ and efficient. In the 1980s, Wincor Nixdorf manufactured cash terminals for Aldi at its plant in Paderborn. The system ran a DOS-based in-store software application, which, over the years, has been frequently adapted to cope with the new challenges of modern-day retailing. Even in those early days of collaboration, Wincor Nixdorf and Aldi combined their resources to speed up the checkout process and reduce long lines.