How a chain of 260 supermarkets stopped paying per user and digitized 8,000 paper contracts

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800 licenses and a bill that keeps growing

The chain had been digitizing its in-store operations for over a year using a checklist tool. And it was working. Forms that used to be on paper were now on mobile devices, supervisors were completing their routines with 99% compliance, and the operational excellence team finally had real-time visibility.

The problem wasn’t the tool. It was the business model behind it.

Every user cost money. Every new supervisor added to the process meant one more license. And when the chain began to grow—opening one convenience store per week—the costs skyrocketed. 800 active licenses and counting. The IT Director summed it up in a phrase his operations team already knew all too well: “We want to digitize more, but I don’t have the budget anymore.”

The per-user billing model had become a roadblock to digital transformation.

The diagnosis: three symptoms that no one had linked

When we first sat down with the operational excellence team, we identified three issues that were being managed separately within the company but shared the same root cause.

The first was the cost of scaling up. The chain operates three formats: large supermarkets, convenience stores, and a discount format. Only the main format had been digitized. The convenience store format—the fastest-growing, with more than 130 locations—remained outside the system because integrating it would require hundreds of new licenses. Each new store meant additional costs. And they were opening one per week.

The second issue was functional. The head of digitalization had three requirements that her current vendor had failed to address for over a year: a customizable weighted scoring system for store audits, a restriction on using photos from the gallery to prevent the use of outdated evidence, and the automatic generation of action plans when a response was negative. These three features may seem simple, but without them, the team was still resorting to manual workarounds.

No one saw the third one coming. In the middle of the conversation about checklists, the IT Director brought up something that wasn’t on the agenda: “We have over 8,000 employee contracts on paper. Some of our stores are 40 or 50 years old. And a new legal director has just joined who needs to bring order to all of that.” Lease agreements, employment contracts, health records, supplier agreements. All stored in physical filing cabinets, unindexed, unsearchable, and undigitized.

Three different problems. One common cause: the technology they had limited them rather than empowering them.

Phase 1: Unlimited users and a server all to yourself

The first decision was to change the model. Instead of paying for each user who accessed the system, the chain switched to a fixed annual license with unlimited users and a dedicated private server.

The impact on the IT team’s mindset was immediate. They no longer had to calculate how many licenses they “could afford.” If Operations wanted to digitize a new process, they simply did it. If the convenience store format needed to onboard 200 supervisors, there was no additional cost. If a new department—such as Quality or Human Resources—wanted to create its own checklists, go ahead.

Additionally, the dedicated server addressed a concern the IT Director had raised from the very beginning: the chain’s data would not be shared with other clients. Backups in two different regions, data synchronization with their data lake up to four times a day, and a direct connection to their Business Intelligence tools.

The migration of existing templates was completed in less than a month. The digitization team, which already had established operational procedures in place, barely noticed the transition. The same colors, the same headers, the same workflows. The only difference was that they could now scale up without any drawbacks.

The three remaining functional requirements were resolved before launch: customizable weighted scoring, time-limited photo access, and automatic action plans upon completion of each checklist. What had been on hold for over a year was set up in weeks.

Phase 2: 8,000 contracts going paperless

The second phase was the one no one had planned for, but it generated the most enthusiasm internally.

The chain’s legal department managed more than 8,000 employee contracts, hundreds of store lease agreements—some dating back decades—and all documentation related to health permits and supplier agreements. Everything was on paper. Finding a specific contract could take hours. And when it couldn’t be found, the legal risk was real.

Using AIDOCS, an intelligent digitization system was set up: each contract is scanned, processed using optical character recognition, and run through an AI model that extracts key fields—such as parties involved, dates, terms, renewals, and critical clauses. A human verifies that the extraction is correct, and with a single click, the data is indexed and ready for export.

The cost per processed page is less than one cent. For the initial batch of over 8,000 documents, the total processing cost was less than $60 in AI credits. The estimated savings in manual search time exceed 2,000 hours per year.

But the real value isn’t in the hours saved. It’s in the fact that the general counsel—who had just joined the company—was able, within his first quarter, to access a searchable database of all the chain’s contractual documentation. Lease agreements that hadn’t been reviewed in decades turned up with terms that no one remembered. Automatic renewals that were about to expire were detected in time. And the legal team went from searching for papers to analyzing information.

Results

Does this story sound familiar to you?

You’ve probably been in one of these situations:

• You pay per user, and every time you want to scale up a process, you end up with a higher bill
• Your checklist tool works, but there are requests that have been on hold for months (or years)
• You have entire departments that still work with paper because “digitizing them isn’t in the budget”
• Your business is growing faster than your current provider’s ability to keep up
• You’re concerned about relying on a single provider who might raise prices at the next renewal

If any of these sound familiar, you’re probably in the same situation this chain was in before making the change.

Here’s how it works

IRISTRACE is a platform for checklists, audits, and inspections that supports an unlimited number of users, offers full offline functionality, and comes with a dedicated server. It adapts to any operational process—from store inspections to quality audits, training programs, and incident tracking—without any licensing restrictions.

AIDOCS is an intelligent document data extraction system. It digitizes any paper document—contracts, delivery notes, invoices, records—and uses artificial intelligence to extract key data, converting it into structured, searchable, and exportable information.

Together, they cover the entire process: from data collection in the field to the digitization of the historical archive.

Would you like to see how it would work in your operation?

Request a personalized demo with no obligation. We’ll show you what the migration from your current tool would look like and the actual savings based on your number of stores and users.

→ Request a demo → Contact the team