Margins in retail keep shrinking while shoppers grow less patient by the season. A delayed delivery, a clunky checkout, a price that doesn’t match the app — any of it sends a customer elsewhere. That’s why CPG and retail brands stopped treating IT as overhead and started treating it as the thing that decides whether they keep a customer at all. Below: five companies actually doing this work, picked for variety rather than size, each tackling a different piece of the same puzzle.
Fifty Years, Three Big Shifts
Barcodes and registers that finally talked to a warehouse — that’s where it started. Then ERP systems rolled in during the 90s, expensive and rigid, but at least everyone stopped arguing over which spreadsheet was correct. E-commerce came next and split that single truth right back into pieces: store inventory, online inventory, two different numbers.
Cloud fixed some of that mess in the 2010s. No more buying servers before Black Friday and praying. Mobile apps and loyalty programs followed, turning every purchase into a data trail. Now AI runs the show — forecasting demand, adjusting prices in real time, watching self-checkout cameras for theft. Same pattern every time: new tech promises simplicity, delivers complexity, and somebody eventually builds the layer that makes it usable again.
Companies Worth Knowing
DXC Technology
Six decades in enterprise IT, and two of the top three global CPG brands trust DXC with cloud migration and transformation work. Its Smart Factory & Store platform links edge devices with shop-floor analytics, and DXC SPARK for CPG, built alongside AWS, helps cut variable operating costs.
The firm also runs SAP S/4HANA migrations under a roughly year-long framework and builds price-recommendation tools for markdown decisions. Recent projects include a transformation deal with Northeast Grocery and a data partnership with fashion retailer Parfois.
Endava
London-headquartered, with delivery teams scattered across Romania, Moldova, and Colombia. Endava builds custom software for brands that don’t want to bend an off-the-shelf platform into something it was never meant to be.
Cloud-native architecture is their comfort zone, and they’ve done checkout modernization work with payment processors and grocery chains alike. Listed on NYSE since 2020, the company has since grown its retail arm through acquisitions focused on data engineering — and clients tend to mention the pricing being friendlier than the big consultancies, without losing senior engineering talent on the work.
Globant
Started in Buenos Aires, now operating across more than thirty countries, Globant cut its teeth on entertainment and media before retail became a serious focus. Teams are organized into “Studios” by skill rather than locked to single accounts, which speeds up how fast ideas move between projects.
Personalization engines, loyalty platforms, an AI lab tinkering with generative product descriptions and visual search — that’s the retail portfolio. The internal culture leans playful, gamified even, and it shows up in client demos that feel less like a pitch deck and more like a product reveal.
Sii Group
Based in Poland, strong footing across Central Europe, Sii leans into the engineering side of retail tech — warehouse automation, IoT sensor networks, smart shelves wired with embedded systems. Rather than chasing pure retailers, Sii often partners directly with manufacturers, helping CPG firms connect production lines into wider supply chain visibility.
Hardware-software integration is where the company stands out, a space plenty of software-first consultancies just avoid. Predictive maintenance for logistics fleets, RFID tracking across EU distribution centers — that’s the kind of work that fills their case studies.
Synechron
Founded in New York with roots planted firmly in financial services, Synechron found its way into retail through fintech-adjacent skills — embedded payments, buy-now-pay-later setups, fraud detection tuned for checkout flows. Innovation labs let the company prototype fast before committing to a full build, useful for retailers testing new payment rails.
Supply chain finance platforms connecting retailers and suppliers on payment terms round out the offering — unglamorous work, sure, but the kind that keeps cash flowing, and flashier vendors tend to skip right past it.
Picking a Partner Without Regretting It Later
Choosing a vendor here isn’t like choosing a CRM tool. Get it wrong mid-migration and a POS system goes down during peak season — not a great look. Worth checking before signing anything:
- Has the vendor actually touched SKU-level inventory logic, or is this their first retail client?
- Can they connect Shopify, an old SAP install, and a homegrown warehouse system without a full rebuild?
- Is PCI compliance baked in, given how often POS systems get targeted?
- Do they have a reference client running comparable volume — not just slides?
Before Signing Anything
None of these five is automatically the right call — it depends on what’s actually breaking. A grocery chain fighting inventory drift needs different muscle than an apparel brand chasing personalization. Check case studies in the specific sub-vertical, push hard on timelines, and watch for a vendor willing to say no to a bad idea instead of nodding along.
FAQ
Do these firms only take on huge enterprises? Not really — most run projects for mid-sized retailers and regional CPG brands too.
How long does an ERP migration usually take? Six months to over a year, depending on how messy the legacy system is.
Can smaller chains realistically use AI tools? Yes, plenty of vendors offer modular pricing or forecasting tools that don’t need a full platform swap.
What’s the biggest mistake when choosing a partner? Picking based on brand recognition instead of checking real experience with similar systems.
Should cybersecurity be its own separate contract? Better baked into the main engagement from day one — POS and payment systems get targeted constantly.
