Is your ERP Transformation holding your business hostage? It doesn’t have to.
As we engage with more retailers across Australia and New Zealand, we’re seeing clear and concerning patterns emerge — ones that are quietly undermining performance right across the sector.
There are 2 threads to this story: Planning Accuracy and IT Distraction
Planning Accuracy Is the Silent Killer of Retail Brands
The last few years have delivered seismic shocks to retail — from Covid to TEMU, from tariffs to supply chain chaos. These shifts have exposed a major performance gap and efficiencies in demand and inventory planning.
A few years ago, you could survive with imperfect forecasts and still hold margin. Not anymore. Poor planning accuracy today means bloated warehouses filled with the wrong products, empty shelves, and a P&L dripping red. Quietly but consistently, planning failure is at the root of many retail collapses — and we’re not talking about it enough.
At one end of the spectrum, some retailers are still trying to run their forecasting on Excel. These businesses are stuck in the past. At the other end, we see retailers using AI-powered planning tools to outperform the market. In between are organisations running legacy tools — that are simply not up to the job.
The evidence is clear: AI is 30-50% more accurate than traditional planning methods, including the mainstay of statistical planning methods available in legacy and current ERPs. So why isn't everyone doing it?
ERP Projects Are Holding Retailers Hostage
Many (even most?) large retailers are knee-deep in ERP transformations — especially customers migrating on premise to cloud, SAP S4/Hana a good example. These projects are long, expensive, and all-consuming. They rarely deliver functional planning improvements but consume all available resources — leaving nothing left for strategic improvement elsewhere.
Here’s the problem: if your planning was broken before your ERP migration, it’ll still be broken after. But by then, you’ve lost another 12–24 months. The good news? That timeline is totally unnecessary.
You don't need to wait
Based on our work with major retailers like Farmers and Sanofi, we know it’s not only possible but surprisingly easy to implement a modern AI planning solution in parallel with an ERP transformation. In fact, it's perfectly reasonable to expect to be up and running within 8 weeks of project kick, in full, on time and to budget.
Today’s cloud-based point solutions like Quantiful can be deployed in under two months with minimal integration, minimal cost, and near-immediate benefit. Forget long RFPs. The agile approach is simple: trial a tool, test it in live conditions, and scale only if it performs. If not, move on. Cloud makes it easy to prove value without betting the farm.
Getting started is simple
We only need one thing to generate accurate, SKU-level forecasts for you: A raw export of your historical sales and inventory data.
It doesn’t need to be clean. AI is exceptional at handling messy data and filling gaps. We’ll take that file, generate forecasts, and return the results in a format your team can use immediately.
If you’re in the middle of an IT transformation (and let’s be honest — who isn’t?) you can’t afford to wait to fix your planning. You need to act now. And with Quantiful, you can.