Top trends and priorities focus on profitability, customer experience and diversification

 

We met with 104 retail, consumer goods and wholesale executives to understand their top priorities and how they are preparing for and adapting to key trends shaping their organisations. This year, executives are prioritszing:

  • Improving the customer experience to deliver on their brand promise
  • Expanding in new markets and/or with new products and services to drive revenue growth
  • Increasing profitability to invest in transformation and growth initiatives
supermarket worker helping customer use self service checkout

Key findings

 

 

 

Budget constraints and legacy systems hinder achieving business priorities.

 

 

 

 

85%
plan to sustain or decrease their OpEx budgets over the next year
41%
say legacy systems pose a significant challenge to successfully implementing digital strategies
72%
say their business model is highly impacted by digitisation
 
 

Supply chain management, data and AI, and sustainability rise in importance

 

  • Enhancing supply chain agility grows in importance
    Supply chain reconfiguration is the most cited action to evolve organisations’ business value chains
  • Consumer behaviors and regulation drive sustainable approaches
    74% of clients rate sustainability as highly core to creating future value (vs. 66% last year)
  • AI is the top digital capability investment over the next 3 years
    86% of clients are investigating AI and Gen AI
latin man working with laptop inside apparel shop

What digital leaders do to accelerate results

Organisations generating expected results from their digitisation strategies—the digital leaders—share common attributes that enable them to accelerate outcomes compared to others. For example, digital leaders in retail, consumer goods and wholesale:

mechanical gear icon

Have a highly mature strategy to leverage data and digitisation

+19pp

vs. industry average

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Extend data protection strategies to their ecosystem

+22pp

vs. industry average

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Have highly agile
business models

+15pp

vs. industry average

pp = percentage points

 

Recommendations for improving data and operations to drive innovation

1

Become data-driven to harness AI and gain insights for improved profitability, decision-making and customer experience.

2

Use managed services to enhance service quality and reduce IT OpEx.

3

Focus on friction-free omnichannel customer experience across physical and digital touchpoints, including stock visibility.

4

Develop an IT roadmap to replace legacy systems with modern applications.

5

Build a secure and agile supply chain with a resilient sourcing strategy and AI tools for forecasting.

6

Partner with change management experts to navigate complex and ongoing change with a people-centric approach.
smiling male store assistant in supermarket typing on tablet

 

 

We help retail, consumer goods and wholesale organisations transform to deliver on their brand promise through our strategic IT and business consulting services, system integration, managed IT services, intellectual property solutions and data-driven approaches. Learn more about:

 

    Managed IT services   Artificial intelligence  Business Consulting