Automation in Retail Brands: The Next Step After Digitalization
Retail brands have come a long way. For the longest time, everything was manual — invoices, ledgers, dispatch slips, and what not. Then came the wave of digitalization. Tools like Zoho, Vyapar, Unicommerce, and many others finally helped brands ditch paperwork and move to digital systems.
And yes, that was a big leap. But here’s the question — is that enough?
Because even today, most retail brands, while being “digital,” are still not automated. Teams spend hours every day interacting with different software, downloading data from one app, uploading it to another, preparing Excel sheets, and generating reports — all manually.
Recently, we came across a team in a large retail brand that spends around 2 hours per day doing nothing but copying and pasting data between systems — to generate something as basic as a backorder or an order fulfillment report. And there are three people doing this. That’s six hours of pure human effort every single day — on work that machines can easily handle.
Now imagine this — with automation, those six hours can shrink to just 30 minutes. One person can simply trigger a process, give it the necessary inputs, and let the system handle the rest. No repetitive effort, no room for error, and no wasted potential.
That’s the difference between being digital and being automated and energized.
Digitalization brings data online. Automation makes that data work for you.
And this is where most retail brands are still lagging behind — not because they don’t want to, but because they think they’re already “modern” after moving to cloud tools.
The truth is, the next big leap for retail won’t come from another app or dashboard. It’ll come from integrating those systems and automating the processes between them — order processing, reconciliation, reporting, logistics, and beyond.
That’s where the real efficiency, cost savings, and innovation begin. That’s where the next wave of growth lies.