Your biggest technology risk isn’t choosing the wrong platform—it’s helping your organization successfully adopt and use it
You’ve made the decision. After months of evaluation, stakeholder meetings, and budget negotiations, you’re ready to transform your merchandising, supply chain, and pricing operations with a modern, cloud-based software platform. The business case is compelling: improved forecasting accuracy, optimized inventory levels, reduced out-of-stocks, enhanced pricing capabilities, and significant operational savings.
But here’s an important reality that software vendors rarely emphasize upfront: technology transformation success depends on human adoption as much as technical implementation.
The core challenges of retail technology adoption
Industry best practices suggest that a retailer should plan an additional 10-20% on top of the technology investment for change management, ensuring that teams adopt, train, and use the new solution. While this additional investment may seem significant, the returns are compelling. Consider that a 2% improvement in on-shelf availability results in approximately a 1% lift in sales. For a $1B retailer, that equates to $10M in additional annual sales.
More importantly, unsuccessful implementations often require major redirects or complete restarts, drastically extending the time to value and creating organizational resistance to future improvements.
The human impacts of digital transformation
Merchandising, supply chain, and pricing systems aren’t typical enterprise software. They don’t simply automate existing processes — they fundamentally reshape how your most experienced and influential team members work:
- Category managers, who have built careers on market intuition and vendor relationships, must learn to trust algorithmic recommendations and data-driven insights.
- Supply chain planners, who navigated disruptions through institutional knowledge, must begin to embrace system-generated forecasts and automated planning.
- Pricing analysts, who have protected margins through careful Excel modeling and manual oversight, transition to dynamic, automated decision-making.
- IT team members, who have directly controlled systems, are shifting from technical problem-solvers to vendor relationship managers and integration orchestrators.
Team members who have built careers on a specific way of working may need time to embrace such significant changes. In some cases, they may initially see them as a challenge to their established expertise.
The opportunity becomes instilling trust and helping everyone understand that these changes represent more than process improvements—they are strategic shifts that leverage automation to transform individual expertise into scalable, repeatable business processes.
The potential cost of implementation challenges
According to recent Gartner research, 60% of supply chain digital adoption efforts fail to deliver promised value, meaning only 40% of planning system implementations achieve their promised adoption rates. When transformation efforts face challenges, the financial and organizational costs compound far beyond your initial software investment:
Financial impact
- Direct losses: SaaS fees, implementation costs, and consulting expenses with minimal return.
- Opportunity costs: Delayed competitive advantages while you reset and restart.
- Compound inefficiencies: Continued reliance on legacy systems that limit scalability.
Organizational consequences
- Market position erosion: Competitors advance while you address internal adoption challenges.
- Change fatigue: Increased organizational resistance to future transformation initiatives.
- Talent retention issues: Your best people become frustrated with inadequate tools that complicate rather than enhance their roles.
The stakes are particularly high because these systems directly impact customer-facing outcomes: product availability, pricing accuracy, and inventory optimization.
The RELEX advantage: Built for adoption success
With a 97% customer retention rate, RELEX doesn’t just provide powerful technology—we deliver proven implementation methodologies that drive higher adoption rates and faster ROI realization.
Our adoption-centered approach includes:
Comprehensive understanding of business goals: Expert teams and prescriptive strategies that guide customers through deployment intuitively, addressing both the technical and human elements of transformation.
AI-enabled support: Rebot, our AI assistant, accelerates adoption by answering user questions instantly, eliminating support ticket delays and reducing friction during the learning curve.
Data governance integration: These systems share critical master data. Our approach includes clear ownership structures, procedure updates, and quality checks to prevent common challenges.
Strategic implementation and deployment: We help implement around critical business periods, such as pre-holiday buying and annual planning cycles, protecting operational continuity during your most crucial revenue periods.
Establishing clear ROI metrics: We help create well-defined KPIs upfront—sales lift, reduced markdowns, improved availability—to maintain momentum and executive support.
Addressing AI concerns: Clear communication strategies that help teams understand how AI enhances rather than replaces their expertise, positioning automation as a tool for strategic elevation and career growth rather than job displacement.
Ongoing learning support: We provide continuous learning resources that extend beyond initial implementation, including the RELEX Community, Skills Academy, and customer success programs.
Forecasting & replenishment: The foundation layer
Supply chain planning software touches every aspect of your operation, from vendor relationships to store deliveries. Incomplete adoption or continued reliance on shadow systems creates process complications that can be more expensive and inefficient than original processes, leading to missed ROI targets and potentially higher costs than before implementation.
Critical success factors:
- Amplify vendor collaboration: Your buyers and planners possess years of institutional knowledge about your supplier network and their capabilities. To ensure widespread adoption, processes like minimum order quantities, case pack requirements, and lead time calculations should be validated before going live with a new system. Further, if supplier connections rely on paper, spreadsheets, or legacy EDI systems, you need to undergo thoughtful collaboration up front to reconfigure processes effectively, often beginning with smaller vendors before scaling to the entire network.
- Optimize distribution center processes: Manual processes build up over time, often varying from location to location, creating dozens of workflows with inconsistent results. Perishable products bring unique challenges—spoilage, expiration dates, handling requirements, and varying store needs. Implementing scalable and sustainable processes consistently across all locations helps prevent under- or overstocking issues and optimizes efficient product flow from DCs to stores.
- Transform store operations: Store staff must learn to adapt from manual order adjustments to system-driven replenishment, representing a significant shift in how they use their expertise. Balancing local expertise with centralized optimization while maintaining operational flexibility is essential. Providing store employees with both data visibility and the ability to adjust inventory and orders through mobile solutions helps ensure smoother product flow while maintaining resilience and agility.
Strategy: Enhance expertise through collaboration
Position automated recommendations as tools that elevate existing expertise rather than replace it. Clear communication from leadership is essential to reinforce that the goal is to free up time for more strategic, value-added activities like innovation, vendor collaboration, and growth. Create “expert panels” where key team members help calibrate system parameters, ensuring recommendations align with business reality and building trust through active participation.
Space & assortment: Where art meets science
Merchandisers are revenue drivers with decades of market knowledge and proven instincts. Supporting them through changes to their decision-making process requires building trust in data-enhanced methods while respecting their expertise.
Critical success factors:
- Help teams move beyond spreadsheet dependency: Merchandisers often rely on personalized, complex spreadsheet models built over years with custom macros and formulas. Building trust in any new system right away is essential to encourage full adoption and prevent the continued use of shadow systems or defaulting back to spreadsheets instead of the new platform.
- Time implementation around business cycles: Merchandising teams operate on strict seasonal and promotional calendars. To avoid potentially disruptive impacts to operations such as category reviews, vendor negotiations, and buyer meetings, any new technology must be planned and implemented in accordance with their schedules.
- Balance art and science: Regional expertise and customer knowledge remain valuable and valid. Algorithms alone can’t explain regional nuances, like why a product sells in one place but not another. It’s critical to demonstrate how data science supports rather than replaces merchandising intuition, particularly for planogram and floor plan creation.
Strategy: Establish system credibility from day one
Create feedback loops where users can easily report concerns through clear escalation paths, which promotes user empowerment in decision-making when system recommendations seem questionable. “Power user” support networks within teams provide immediate, peer-based assistance when system questions arise, preventing users from reverting to older methods. Tracking adoption by system usage — not just training completion — improves KPI accuracy, and building in productivity buffers during the learning period and celebrating incremental improvements drives morale.
Price & promotion planning: The speed and accuracy imperative
Pricing errors directly impact margins and regulatory compliance. Issues such as macroeconomic shifts, competitor pressures, and supplier constraints require teams to react faster than ever while managing complex promotional structures across multiple channels and regions.
Critical success factors:
- Break down functional silos: Many retailers use disconnected systems for pricing, promotions, and supply chain, creating limited visibility and poor coordination. Fostering cross-functional collaboration through unified planning systems keeps all teams working toward the same goals with the same data and rules. Further, proactive process and workflow redesign during implementation promotes clarity and consistent, data-driven decisions.
- Amplify competitive response: Teams are constantly under pressure to keep up with market demands. When new solutions are implemented, they need to master those solutions without falling behind the competition. Ensuring that implementation timing and training depth correspond to the most competitively intensive periods will help reduce stress and increase onboarding speed.
- Master promotional complexity: Multi-buy offers, loyalty tiers, and regional variations require comprehensive testing before full deployment. Ensuring that the supply chain and promotions teams are completely aligned is essential to avoid over- or understocking issues that result in lost sales or costly waste and markdowns.
Strategy: Transform data abundance into strategic execution
Reduce manual planning by leveraging AI-driven automation to eliminate time-consuming processes that consume planners’ bandwidth while reducing data corruption risks. Scenario testing capabilities using digital twin environments with real-world data to test “what-if” scenarios before implementation are essential to enabling retailers to validate pricing strategies and promotional plans without market risk. Advanced assessment of past promotions and pricing decisions can help teams eliminate underperforming campaigns while reallocating resources to high-impact initiatives that drive sustainable competitive advantage.
The leadership success framework
High-performing transformations share these executive-driven characteristics:
Clear vision communication
Regular leadership meetings that consistently explain the strategic “why” behind the change, connecting technology capabilities to business outcomes.
Realistic timeline expectations
Understanding that full benefits typically emerge in months 6-12, not weeks, requires sustained leadership commitment through the adoption curve.
Structured governance
Regular steering committee meetings during implementation to address obstacles, celebrate progress, and maintain momentum across all stakeholder groups.
Recognition and celebration
Public acknowledgment of early adopters and measurable wins to build organizational confidence and encourage broader participation.
Your strategic decision point
Enterprise technology implementations represent business transformations, not IT projects. To achieve their full potential, they require careful orchestration of people, processes, and technology.
The businesses who thrive in today’s market don’t just adopt new technology. They master the human side of transformation.
Your choice of technology partner directly impacts adoption success. Organizations that prioritize user-centered change management don’t just implement software; they build competitive advantages that compound over time.
Your merchandising, supply chain, and pricing leaders possess significant organizational influence. Getting their genuine buy-in helps ensure success, eliminate potential challenges, and create the foundation for sustained competitive advantage.
Are you ready to ensure your technology investment delivers its full potential? Reach out to learn how our proven approach can accelerate your transformation success.
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