Nearly $460M in new revenue.
One roadmap, built from zero.
A retail advisory practice built from scratch, packaging more than 25 technology solutions into a single roadmap for omnichannel and unified commerce — store, inventory, fulfilment and payments treated as one system.
for the business
introduced
spanning the portfolio
CX, EX, cost-to-serve
Client
A multinational information and communications technology equipment and services company, serving large-format stores, specialty chains and omnichannel grocers through its retail vertical.
Goal
Build a retail advisory practice that would improve customer experience, employee experience and cost-to-serve efficiency for retail clients, while establishing the company as a technology partner for omnichannel and unified commerce transformation.
Retailers were modernising in the middle of a fight for the customer.
Retail clients were under pressure from pure-play digital entrants and larger omnichannel competitors, and needed to modernise systems and processes without disrupting operations already running at scale. Legacy systems were fragmented, inventory and order management sat in silos, and customer journeys were inconsistent across channels — problems that showed up as slower fulfilment and eroding margins.
Internally, retailers struggled to tie technology investment to measurable CX and EX outcomes, and few had a coherent roadmap for unified commerce — combining in-store, online, mobile and fulfilment into one experience. The company had no existing advisory offer for this. It had to prove value quickly through real client wins while building something repeatable enough to scale across accounts.
Three constraints were non-negotiable:
- Fragmented legacy systems and siloed inventory
- Inconsistent customer journeys across channels
- Labour and fulfilment models eroding margins
A retail advisory practice, built from zero, with one roadmap per client.
The company built a retail advisory practice from scratch: multidisciplinary teams combining retail strategy, technology architecture, implementation and change management. Leadership ran it end to end — developing the go-to-market proposition, leading client engagements, writing the proposals, and coordinating delivery with partner ecosystems.
Retailers didn’t need another platform. They needed one roadmap that made every channel behave like one.
The centrepiece was a single roadmap per client, linking customer-facing channels, store operations, inventory visibility, order orchestration and fulfilment. Around it, the practice packaged more than 25 technology solutions into modular offerings — cloud migration and API-led integration, modern point-of-sale and mobile checkout, unified order management, real-time inventory visibility, e-commerce modernisation, personalised engagement engines, AI-driven merchandising and demand forecasting, workforce scheduling, in-store robotics and automated picking, seamless payments, and returns management — so retailers could pilot one capability and scale it by region.
Engagements ran as fast pilots against measurable KPIs, paired with change programmes to embed new operating models, reworked fulfilment processes, and restructured labour deployment. Partnerships with cloud providers and specialist vendors sped up deployment and fed a consolidated retail analytics layer for decision-making.
$460M in revenue, and a seat as the omnichannel technology leader.
The practice did more than deliver a number. It gave the company a repeatable, referenceable way to walk into any retail account with a proven roadmap already in hand. That’s what turned one engagement into a portfolio, and a portfolio into a market position.
* Case studies reflect work undertaken by our Heads of AI either during their tenure with Head of AI or in prior roles before they were part of the Head of AI network; they are provided for illustrative purposes only and are based on conversations with our Heads of AI.
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*Case studies reflect work undertaken by our Heads of AI either during their tenure with Head of AI or in prior roles before they were part of the Head of AI network; they are provided for illustrative purposes only and are based on conversations with our Heads of AI.