In today’s retail landscape, customer expectations have never been higher. Shoppers want to move effortlessly between in-store visits, mobile browsing, social commerce, and digital marketplaces, expecting every interaction to be seamless and personalized.
Behind the scenes, retailers struggle to deliver these experiences due to fragmented, outdated, and incomplete data that makes real-time decision-making nearly impossible and hampers engagement, operational efficiency, and, ultimately, profitability.
The hidden costs of disconnected data
When retailers’ data exists in silos, the problem is compounded from all angles. With sales, inventory, marketing, and customer engagement data living in separate systems, retailers lack the clear view of customer behavior and business insights they need to respond with critical actions in real time. Lack of context within the data means businesses struggle to extract meaningful insights.
Consider the impact:
- Limited inventory visibility leads to stockouts and overstocks, frustrating customers and eroding profits.
- Lack of real-time insights hinders personalized customer engagement, diminishing loyalty.
- Disconnected operations make omnichannel fulfillment—such as buy online, pick up in-store (BOPIS) or hassle-free returns—difficult to execute smoothly.
At a moment when retailers must optimize every facet of their business to remain competitive, a unified data strategy isn’t optional—it’s essential.
A data-driven future: Turning insights into action
To break these silos, retailers need a unified data foundation—one that consolidates insights across all customer touchpoints, enabling real-time intelligence and business agility. SAP Business Data Cloud (SAP BDC), as recently announced, is an integrated solution that can bring data together from all sources, owned and external, to help create a single, trusted source of truth.
With SAP Business Data Cloud, retailers can have the total picture of data from sales, inventory, marketing, loyalty, service, and near-real-time statuses of third-party logistics.
With this holistic view, retailers can:
- Enable seamless cross-channel fulfillment, such as buy online, pick up in-store or return anywhere.
- Optimize operational efficiency for everything from intelligent sourcing and promotional planning to inventory visibility and availability across sales channels.
- Personalize customer engagement by leveraging data-driven insights to boost loyalty and increase revenue.
By shifting to a data-first approach, retailers can move beyond managing transactions to driving intelligent, customer-centric experiences for long-term loyalty and growth.
Why physical stores still matter—more than ever
Despite the rise of e-commerce, more than 80% of retail interactions still take place in physical stores. Brick-and-mortar locations remain central to the retail journey, yet, as retailers’ largest cost center, they also encompass the biggest operational challenges—from inventory carrying costs to labor and store operations.
Although today’s consumers are fluid in how they shop—researching products across multiple platforms or buying online and picking up in-store, for example—they still expect accurate, real-time visibility into inventory wherever they engage. In this landscape, data is the lifeblood that allows retailers to orchestrate orders, manage workflows, and ensure that customers can trust the information they see. Yet, according to a new report released today from SAP Emarsys, 51% of U.S. brands say their organization suffers from “dark data,” which is data that is collected but not effectively used.
To remain competitive, retailers must harness real-time transactional insights to optimize store efficiency, maximize revenue, and provide seamless customer interactions.
Bringing it all together: Intelligent order management
Retailers don’t just need data—they also need actionable, real-time intelligence that helps them drive smarter decision-making. That’s why SAP is integrating advanced order management capabilities as part of our broader data-driven customer experience strategy. SAP has a long history of helping thousands of retail and B2C customers manage vast amounts of data. Today we’re tailoring this expertise, trusted by market leaders worldwide, to help meet the scale, flexibility, and time-to-value required by fast-growing organizations.
As part of the SAP Order Management Services bundle, we are launching the SAP Omnichannel Sales Transfer and Audit solution today at Shoptalk in Las Vegas, Nevada. This modular, cloud-native solution can empower retailers with real-time visibility into transactions and inventory, helping to reduce friction and improve customer satisfaction. SAP Omnichannel Sales Transfer and Audit can unify POS data from multiple systems, process high-volume transactions in real time, and help ensure inventory accuracy across all channels to improve stock availability, financial reporting, and customer engagement—without the burden of complex, custom-built integrations.
Apart from omnichannel sales and audit capabilities, the SAP Order Management Services bundle also includes additional modular, cloud-native capabilities including SAP Order Management foundation and the SAP Order Management solution for sourcing and availability. The SAP Order Management Services bundle is natively connected with SAP S/4HANA, which can enable retail and consumer products organizations and other consumer brands to unlock real-time inventory visibility, streamline fulfillment, and reduce operational costs without complex and costly custom integrations. And, integrated with SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, retail, fashion, and vertical business, announced at NRF earlier this year, the cloud-native capabilities of the SAP Order Management Services bundle can be even more scalable, secure, compliant, and affordable, enabling retailers to realize value more quickly than ever before.
Other benefits of SAP Omnichannel Sales Transfer and Audit include:
- Seamless POS integration can connect multiple POS systems with different data structures, working to eliminate silos and ensure data accuracy.
- Real-time inventory updates help keep omnichannel inventory accurate so customers can trust what they see online matches what’s available in-store.
- Smarter data processing and configurable data transfer and aggregation help update inventory, financials, and even loyalty programs effortlessly.
- Optimized sales data validation process can automate checks that are executed through configurable workflows.
By embracing a unified data strategy, retailers can eliminate complexity, reduce costs, and unlock new opportunities for growth—all while delivering the frictionless experiences today’s consumers expect.
Hornbach: The future of omnichannel retail in action
For Hornbach, one of the largest DIY stores in Germany, the idea of interconnected retail is more than just omnichannel. It needs to be able to add new channels quickly—and to maintain a seamless customer experience over all channels. Hornbach adopted SAP Order Management Services as a foundation for this vision, enabling the flexibility to address new markets quickly, connect new systems, process orders rapidly and efficiently, and adopt new innovations. With the addition of SAP Omnichannel Sales and Transfer Audit, the Hornbach team expects to get more visibility in day-to-day operations, like checking fraud detection and the completeness of transactions.
“The most exciting thing will be the combination of all these new technologies we’re seeing: artificial intelligence, event-driven architecture, as well as native cloud solutions,” said Carsten Mueller, head of Enterprise Architecture and Security, Hornbach. “The combination will give Hornbach great power in the next year.”
The future of retail is data-driven
The retail industry is evolving at an unprecedented pace, with AI redefining how businesses operate and interact with customers. According to the same SAP Emarsys report, 89% of U.S. consumer product marketers believe AI will be essential for engaging new customers. However, the effectiveness of AI hinges on the reliability and accuracy of the data it processes.
Retailers that embrace AI-powered data intelligence will lead the next era of omnichannel excellence. The future isn’t just about connecting data—it’s about activating it in real time to drive seamless customer interactions.
To stay ahead, retailers must:
- Invest in AI-driven analytics to predict demand, optimize pricing, and personalize engagement at scale.
- Implement intelligent order and transaction management to automate fulfillment, reduce friction, and improve supply chain agility.
- Leverage AI-powered customer insights to create hyper-personalized experiences that drive loyalty and lifetime value.
- Enable real-time inventory intelligence to ensure products are available where and when customers need them.
As omnichannel complexity grows, brands that fail to unify their data risk falling behind. SAP Business Data Cloud and intelligent order management solutions can provide the foundation for a future-proof transformation. As AI continues to evolve, retailers must shift from reactive decision-making to proactive, predictive commerce, where every transaction is optimized for efficiency and profitability.
The future of retail is here. Those who harness AI to unify, analyze, and act on their data will define the next generation of customer experience and retail success. I’m excited to partner with companies navigating this transformation and empower them to seize new opportunities for success.
Want to learn more? Stay tuned to see how leading retailers are leveraging SAP’s data-driven approach to optimize their operations and stay ahead of the competition and learn more about SAP’s solutions for retail.
Balaji Balasubramanian is president and chief product officer for SAP Customer Experience and Consumer Industries.
