The NTUC FairPrice Co-operative Ltd is one of the largest home grown retail chains in Singapore serving about 400,000 shoppers daily, with a network of over 105 outlets, comprising FairPrice supermarkets, FairPrice Finest and FairPrice Xtra. Its convenience arm comprises a network of about 150 FairPrice Xpress and Cheers convenience stores, which serves over 100,000 customers daily. In the 2011 Financial Year, its group revenue topped S$2.4 billion, registering an increase of about 9% from the previous year. Despite its success, it has continued to live up to its social mission of moderating the cost of living by providing daily essentials like rice, flour, sugar, meats, and vegetables at affordable prices.

NTUC FairPrice managed to achieve success through enhancing their value chain from procurement, warehousing/distribution and retail operations. This is facilitated by implementing standards.

NTUC FairPrice is a strong believer in standards and has been involved in the development of Singapore Standards for more than 10 years. It is certified against HACCP (Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points) and ISO 9001: 2008.

They have also implemented the following Singapore Standards:-

1. Cold Chain Management – Chilled Pork (SS 552:2009)
2. Cold Chain Management – Milk and Dairy Products (SS CP 95:2002)
3. Cold Chain Management of Vegetables (TR 24: 2007)
4. Chilled & Frozen Partially Cooked Fish Ball (SS 565:2011)
5. Pallet Standard: ISO 6780:2003 and SS 334:2010
6. Item Barcode Standards : SS 362 Part 1:2004 (ISO 15420:2000) – Specification for EAN Bar Coding System Part 1: EAN - An unambiguous international product identification system (ISO title: Information technology - Automatic identification and data capture techniques - Bar code symbology specification - EAN/UPC)
7. Carton Barcode Standards: ISO/IEC 16390:2007 (or ITF 2 of 5)

Benefit Highlights of implementing standards 

(Barcoding, Pallet Standard, CC – Chilled Pork and CC – Milk and Dairy)

Barcoding Standard

1. Operational efficiency
   1. Accuracy increased from 85% to 97%
   2. Order fulfilment improved by 38% from 24 hours to 15 hours, covering 33 more stores at a total of 98 stores in 2009
   3. 50% improvement in staff productivity, additional 50% improvement with automated sortation system
2. Manpower
   1. Manpower savings of 50 men under the automated sortation system
   2. 83% reduction in manpower required for stocktaking with increased accuracies
3. Asset utilisation
   1. 18% reduction in leasing costs for space
   2. 58% reduction in cost of PED Fork Lifts and 35% reduction in cost of Reach Trucks
4. Operational cost reduction
   1. 87% reduction in damage rate per week and a reduction of 2 headcounts of manpower handling damage incidents

Pallet Standard

1. Operational efficiency
   1. 77% reduction in man hours on checking, receiving and arranging supplies on pallets
   2. 50% reduction in man hours used for sorting pallets
   3. 50% reduction in man hours due to better information transfer
2. Improved asset utilisation
   1. 77% reduction in no. of receiving bays
   2. 31% reduction in cost of pallets owned
   3. 5 figure reduction in cost of warehouse space used to store pallets

Cold Chain Management - Milk and Dairy Standard

1. Improvement in operational efficiency
   1. 88% reduction in non-conformance cases
   2. 92% reduction in customer return cases
2. Cost reduction
   1. 5 figure reduction in write off cost of products

Cold Chain Management - Chilled Pork Standard

1. Increase in chilled pork sales in 2009
   1. 22% increase from 2005
2. Improvement in operational efficiency
   1. 33% improvement in efficiency
   2. Distribution function efficiency increased by more or equal to 50%
3. Cost reduction
   1. Increased the number of overseas suppliers in the sourcing of chilled pork