Unifying digital and store technology for a national multi-brand retailer

Business context

A well-established Australian retail group operating a portfolio of consumer brands across a national store footprint and a maturing digital footprint. Digital had been treated as a “channel” — meaning it had its own platform, its own stock pool, its own order management, and its own finance ledger, all running in parallel to the store systems. Customers who cheerfully shopped across both naturally did not care about any of this, and the business was increasingly embarrassed when they called asking to return an online order to a store and the system said no.

The board had approved an operating model shift to “one customer, one inventory, one brand promise”. The technology estate was not remotely ready.

The challenge

This was not a greenfield build. It was a live operation with peak trading, multiple distinct brand identities, a store network with real operational sensitivities, and an executive team who — with good reason — had been burned by previous “transformation” programmes that had promised much and delivered PowerPoints.

The real difficulty was never the technology. It was that the digital and store technology functions had historically reported into different executives, run on different budget cycles, and measured success against different KPIs. Making them work as one system required the technology architecture to lead the organisational design, not follow it.

My role

General Manager, IT eCommerce — accountable for digital platform strategy, order management unification, and the technology components of the omnichannel programme. Sat on the transformation steering committee alongside the heads of retail operations, supply chain and merchandising.

What I did

Platform consolidation (year 1). Migrated the brand sites — which had accumulated as a patchwork across two acquired companies and three different platforms — onto a shared Commercetools foundation with brand-specific experience layers built on top. This was not a cosmetic exercise: the shared platform was the pre-condition for every downstream capability. Without one checkout, one customer record, and one stock feed, “omnichannel” is just a word.

Order management as the spine. Selected and implemented Manhattan Active Omni as the single order management system across digital and store. This was the load-bearing decision of the entire programme. Every capability the business wanted — buy online pick up in store, ship from store, reserve in store, return anywhere — required the order management platform to have authoritative visibility of inventory and orders across the network. Got this right and the rest followed; got it wrong and every future initiative would require workarounds.

Store technology partnership. Worked closely with the retail operations technology team to align store systems, hardware refresh cycles, and in-store fulfilment workflows. Deliberately did not try to “absorb” their function. The deal was that the digital team owned the customer-facing digital experience, the retail ops team owned in-store execution, and both teams shared accountability for the order management platform sitting between them. This held together because the joint ownership was baked into the architecture, not just the org chart.

Data unification. Built out a single customer and product data foundation on Snowflake, fed from both digital and store sources. Replaced six different reporting stacks that had previously all disagreed with each other about gross sales.

Vendor consolidation. Over the course of the engagement, reduced the active technology vendor count by 40+ by consolidating overlapping contracts, retiring legacy systems, and negotiating enterprise agreements that reflected the consolidated footprint rather than the historical one.

Outcomes

The brand sites ran on one platform. Click-and-collect, which had previously been a two-day fulfilment exercise because the inventory and order feeds were batch-synced overnight, moved to a two-hour promise for the vast majority of orders — a visible proof point for customers that the omnichannel story was real. Digital revenue mix grew from 14% to 31% of the group total over the engagement period, driven in part by the fact that digital and store were no longer competing for credit. Annual technology operating cost came down $6.2M even as the capability footprint expanded — the savings came from decommissioning, consolidation and contract renegotiation.

The permanent hand-off at the end of the engagement was to an internal successor who had been growing into the role for the final eighteen months of the programme.