As a retailer, you’re constantly adapting to keep up with changing demands - whether it’s launching a new ad campaign, tweaking color schemes, re-styling shelves, or adding a collection point to meet customer expectations.
However, there comes a point when these small adjustments are no longer enough. You reach the "end" - a point where your store or systems no longer fit the purpose they were designed for. That’s when you need more than minor updates - you need to rebuild.
This is especially true when you start offering more dynamic services, like rentals, returns, or subscription models, which legacy systems won’t be able to support. These new demands make it critical to update your finance and supply chain capabilities.
A retailer I recently worked with highlighted this perfectly: on the surface, they were offering a seamless omnichannel experience, but the system’s fragmented backbone couldn't handle evolving services such as rental management. As customer expectations shifted, the cracks in the system became more apparent—impacting inventory visibility, financial records, and overall customer experience.
To move forward, addressing your back-end systems is essential. Take Devold of Norway for example, a leading wool manufacturer. Devold recognized that to achieve its ambitious growth goals, it needed to upgrade its core business technology to meet both current and future requirements. With the support of Columbus, this transformation has reshaped the company’s entire operation - from wool production to supply chain management and retail sales.
In this blog, we discuss practical approaches, like the one Devold adopted, to help you navigate your transformation journey in a coordinated and structured way, ensuring that stakeholders remain aligned, the project stays on track, and both scope and budget are managed effectively.
Take a collaborative approach
One of the most common mistakes I’ve seen is treating digital transformation as a purely IT-driven initiative. From my experience, this approach fails because transformation touches every part of the business. Retailers need to recognize that true success requires not just technology upgrades, but cross-departmental collaboration. Every department—whether it's marketing, operations, or customer service—must clearly understand how digital changes affect their workflows and why these areas are critical to the business as a whole. Ideally, the transformation should begin with requests and needs directly from stakeholders. However, we often see that this isn’t the case. Instead, digital initiatives tend to focus on delivering flashy features without a full understanding of the bigger picture and the true needs of the business.
Effective communication is key. Teams need to align on which business processes need to be transformed, and more importantly, why those areas matter for the success of the entire organization. For example, automating back-end processes can enable more agile customer-facing services, while improving data management can support better decision-making across all departments. When everyone has a shared understanding of the goals and benefits, it becomes easier to drive meaningful change.
The process should start by clearly defining the outcomes you want from your transformation journey, along with a structured plan that connects KPIs to business objectives. This makes sure that digital transformation delivers measurable value across the organization. Maintaining continuous engagement is also vital—this isn’t a "set it and forget it" strategy. A successful digital transformation is a living process, evolving alongside your business needs and market conditions.
Bang & Olufsen is a great example of this approach. The Danish retailer recognized that standardizing its IT systems would significantly enhance customer experiences and service globally. As a result, B&O has been modernizing its IT, linking systems and data so it can provide exceptional services for its customers.
Invest in flexible architecture
Changing business models in the retail industry such as rental services, repairs, recycling, require the right platform that can adapt quickly to market conditions. A composable and flexible architecture offers the agility you need to scale up and down, and make adjustments based on market dynamics, customer needs, and your business goals.
We’ve seen cases where companies faced significant growth challenges due to the limitations of their current system architecture. In one instance, a business’ outdated core infrastructure was restricting its ability to manage increasing demand and adapt to new business models. Addressing these limitations required a major overhaul of their core systems and a rethinking of how teams collaborated.
Had these issues been addressed earlier, the journey ahead could have been much smoother. These experiences highlight the importance of long-term planning and investing in flexible, composable architecture and robust integration capabilities. By doing so, businesses can overcome the hurdles of legacy systems and position themselves for sustainable growth.
However, putting this into practice is much easier said than done. To successfully implement a composable architecture, specialized integration skills are essential. You need to make sure that all components function seamlessly together. Many retailers face the additional hurdle of legacy systems, which may not integrate well with newer, more flexible platforms.
A robust ERP or backbone system is also critical for managing core business processes such as inventory, finance, and human resources. Without a solid foundation, even the most flexible architecture may struggle to deliver the necessary operational efficiency.
Given these challenges, it's crucial to invest in integration expertise and technologies that make sure your platforms work together. By collaborating with an experienced partner, they can assess your technological setup and processes and recommend optimal changes in terms of organization, workflow, and competencies. External expertise will also help you stay ahead of industry trends and enhance your agility and flexibility, so your business can keep moving forward.
Help IT and business work smarter together
Another common problem I see is that IT is often viewed as merely a support function rather than a strategic partner. This narrow perception relegates IT departments to maintenance roles, limiting their potential to influence broader business goals with data analytics. However, by doing this, you miss out on significant business benefits that can be realized by engaging IT in strategic decision-making.
IT is much more than just a cost center—it has the potential to be a value driver. When you involve IT in strategic planning, it transforms from a background role into a central player that can guide innovation and growth. This shift in mindset enables your IT team to contribute to key areas like predictive analytics, customer experience enhancement, and operational optimization.
Effectively manage multiple transformation projects
Coordinating and managing multiple transformation projects simultaneously can feel overwhelming. However, it's increasingly necessary to stay competitive. Companies that try to handle these projects one at a time risk falling behind, potentially facing financial difficulties due to extended timelines, higher cumulative costs, and missed opportunities for operational efficiency or market advantages. Many of our retail customers have recognized the need to manage several initiatives in parallel, as they simply can’t afford to address them one by one.
We’ve developed the following approach for working with our customers that maintains a structured and organized process while staying flexible enough to adapt to changes and new inputs as they arise:
- Collaborate with your key stakeholders to gain a clear understanding of your current business processes. Finalize your project scope and plan based on your specific goals—whether you're aiming to get deeper insights from your data, reduce costs, increase productivity, streamline operations, or enhance customer experience.
- Use a test-driven approach to break down the scope into manageable iterations. This not only allows you to see tangible progress within weeks but also makes sure there’s alignment between the evolving solution and stakeholder expectations. Each iteration serves as a checkpoint, minimizing misunderstandings along the way.
- Test in live environments with real end-users that makes the transition as seamless as possible. A hands-on approach builds confidence and enables a smoother go-live experience.
Kappahl is an excellent example of a retailer whose shift to a sustainability-focused strategy has triggered transformative initiatives across all levels of the organization.
Embracing secondhand - Kappahl's strategy includes capturing market share in both new and secondhand markets. By 2026, the company aims for 50% of its assortment to be circular-enabled, a key step toward reducing its overall climate impact
Enhancing traceability – Kappahl has enabled end-to-end transparency, mapping every stage from raw materials to finished products. This allows Kappahl to not only provide detailed product information to customers, but also collaborate better with suppliers to track and share progress toward sustainability goals
Stay on top of upcoming EU legislation – Kappahl is proactively preparing for upcoming EU regulations such as the digital product passport (DPP), which will require businesses to provide a detailed digital record for each item. The company’s investment in standardized and scalable IT solutions will play a key role in meeting these requirements and achieving its long-term sustainability objectives
You can read more about Kappahl’s digital strategy by clicking here.
Work with continuous improvements
Maintaining a digital platform that’s both stable and adaptable is a significant challenge. On one hand, your platform must be reliable and consistent to support daily operations, making sure that everything from online transactions to inventory management runs smoothly. On the other hand, there’s always new consumer preferences, market trends and opportunities to contend with. To stay competitive, you need your platform to be flexible enough to incorporate these changes quickly. This means adopting an architecture that supports modular upgrades and new features without disrupting existing functionality.
For example, a company in the apparel and accessories industry specializing in “print on demand” services faced challenges with increasing demand for branded merchandise. They struggled with high costs and scalability issues due to the manual process of royalty tagging.
By implementing generative AI, they have significantly improved performance. Gen AI can tag an unlimited number of images on demand, reducing manual effort and increasing throughput. This has freed up employees to focus on more complex, value-added tasks.
Build a data-driven culture
Data is at the heart of digital modernization, however many retailers struggle to capitalize on it effectively. We’re seeing AI increasingly becoming a key tool in driving innovation, from personalized customer experiences to operational efficiency. However, AI is only as good as the data feeding it. Many retailers face the challenge of incomplete or poorly organized data, which limits the potential of AI-driven initiatives.
That’s why having your data in order is crucial. A clean, well-structured data foundation allows AI tools to deliver actionable insights and meaningful outcomes. Partnering with experts who can guide you on the right strategy and tools to use can make all the difference.
Data is also critical for regulatory compliance, such as meeting the upcoming EU Digital Product Passport (DPP) requirements, which demand increased transparency and traceability in the supply chain. The good news is that most of the necessary data is already housed in retailers’ ERP and PLM systems. What’s needed is a strategy to consolidate and manage this data effectively to maintain compliance and drive value across the organization. Read five fundamentals that are needed to help your organization become more data-driven by clicking on the button below.
Lead your transformation projects with confidence
Retailers that continue to overlook upgrading their core processes risk falling behind the competition and limiting their growth potential. While these larger transformation projects can present their own set of challenges, following these foundational strategies – especially with the guidance of an experienced partner – your journey will be far more fruitful, productive, and successful.
An experienced partner brings valuable insights into what works and what doesn’t. With their focus on best practices and industry expertise, they can help make your transformation projects a success. If you're interested in learning more about how we can help your business, please reach out for more information by clicking the button below.
