Beyond “Your Mess for Less”: A New Era of Managed Services for Retail

Tony RostResources, Blog

Tony Rost
By Tony Rost
Global Director
Logic, Part of Accenture

Why mid-market retailers need more than maintenance from their managed services — and how Logic delivers transformation at scale.

With Logic’s acquisition by Accenture, our clients have been curious about what we can now deliver for Helpdesk and Application Managed Services. Our core has always been retail (merchandising, supply chain, stores, digital, and analytics), and we now have access to capabilities for all workflows in the enterprise. But this is only half the story. A key value-add gaining interest is our new philosophy towards managed services: We believe the purpose of the “Run” state in an enterprise architecture is to enable change and transformation, not just maintenance. Accenture calls this “Run to New” — and it’s transforming how our clients view managed services.

Why retail IT struggles (and how to fix it)

Retailers, particularly those in the midmarket, can easily spend 70-80% of their overall IT budgets simply “keeping the lights on.” This unending survival mode is made all the more difficult thanks to some unique contours of the retail IT landscape, like:

  • Comparatively small IT budgets compared to other industries
  • A tech-stack blend of legacy on-premise systems alongside newer cloud or SaaS modules (think of merchandising on-prem with cloud native POS)
  • High operational volatility driven by seasonal peaks, promotions, and supply chain disruptions.
  • Small, cross functional IT teams wearing multiple hats—from break/fix support to project delivery.

With merely 10-20% of budgets going to change and growth, retailers have found themselves in a perpetual game of catch-up with the always-evolving marketplace. This imbalance breeds accumulating technical debt, extended release cycles, and mounting frustration among IT leaders desperate for greater agility and fewer operational headaches. While traditional application managed services can deliver occasional victories in the “Run” state, the fundamental philosophy of “your mess for less” falls short of enabling the change in the face of today’s retail environment demands.

Run to New: A new paradigm for managed services

Accenture defines “Run to New” managed services around six core building blocks:

  1. Technology foundation: An agile digital core integrating infrastructure, applications, security and data.
  2. AI automation: Embedding generative AI across the development lifecycle to accelerate delivery.
  3. Continuous reinvention: Modernizing and simplifying the enterprise stack for faster time to market.
  4. Service experience: Aligning outcome-focused KPIs with business priorities rather than just IT metrics.
  5. Observability: Delivering holistic, data-driven insights across complex hybrid environments.
  6. Talent: Upskilling existing teams and augmenting capabilities to meet evolving needs.

These principles were designed with large-scale enterprises in mind, but Logic’s strength is operationalizing them for mid-market. The following sections detail how we translated each building block into concrete deliverables and tangible results.

Technology foundation

An agile digital core—integrating infrastructure, applications, security, and data—is the north star. But for many mid-market retailers, that ideal often meets a more pragmatic reality. Instead of a wholesale move to a fully integrated hybrid cloud, the focus is on what’s most immediately impactful: strategically migrating key workloads like e-commerce platforms or analytics for scalability and resilience, meeting compliance and security requirements (especially PCI-DSS) across hybrid environments, and enabling smarter integrations between systems. That might mean creating real-time inventory visibility across your WMS, merchandising, and e-commerce front-end, or tightening connections between your POS and CRM—efforts that build a strong, secure, and future-ready foundation without unnecessary disruption.

Logic’s approach We focus on building a right-sized foundation. This might involve helping you migrate your merchandising system or supply chain suite to the cloud in a phased, low-risk manner. It means implementing robust API strategies to connect disparate systems, such as linking your POS data feed securely into a newer CRM or loyalty platform without a full rip-and-replace. The goal is stability, scalability where it counts most (like handling Black Friday traffic surges), and enhanced security posture, creating a platform ready for future innovation without unnecessary complexity or cost.
A retail success story For a home decor retailer, instead of ripping out a 10‑year‑old ERP, we containerized most retail modules, added layered CI/CD pipelines, migrated to OCI, and retired many of their on-prem servers. They now release builds each month, not quarters, and have retired over 80% of their aged technical‑debt backlog without a single unplanned outage.

AI automation

While GenAI holds promise, immediate value often lies in more targeted AI and automation applications. Think automating L1 support responses for common store-level IT issues (password resets, printer troubleshooting), freeing up skilled technicians. Consider automating regression testing for frequent POS or merchandising system updates, reducing manual effort, and speeding up deployment cycles. AI can also be used for predictive analytics on system performance, identifying potential issues in critical batch processes (like nightly polling or inventory updates) before they cause downstream problems.

Logic’s approach We prioritize bottom-up, incremental automation that delivers tangible efficiency and reliability gains now. For instance, we’ve implemented intelligent monitoring tools that don’t just flag alerts but use AI to correlate events across your supply chain applications, pinpointing root causes faster. We help deploy chatbots trained specifically on your store procedures and common IT requests, significantly reducing call volume to the L2/L3 helpdesk. It’s about leveraging AI and automation pragmatically to reduce the “Run” burden where it makes the most sense for your specific retail environment
A retail success story We helped a clothing retailer deploy an operational status classification model in Dataiku, integrating Xstore transaction velocity, system heartbeats, and network telemetry data to distinguish critical technical failures from low-demand scenarios, significantly improving IT Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) for outages.

Continuous reinvention

Modern retail growth demands constant reinvention—but for most mid-market organizations, that doesn’t mean wholesale application replacement. It means being surgical: modernizing modules within a legacy ERP, adopting agile methods in small teams to speed up enhancements, and refactoring brittle integrations to be more flexible. The goal is to reduce technical debt strategically, unlocking more agility and responsiveness without massive investments or disruption.

Logic’s approach We work with you to identify the areas where modernization delivers the biggest bang for the buck. One popular and cost-effective solution is maturing DevSecOps practices to streamline the release processes and remove security vulnerabilities. Another low-hanging fruit is to containerize specific application components for better scalability or developing reusable APIs to expose data from your core merchandising system for use by newer analytics tools or partner integrations. We focus on incremental improvements that reduce risk, enhance flexibility, and directly support business agility.
A retail success story For a specialty goods retailer, we implemented cross-system monitoring, using Elastic, focused on their inventory synchronization process between their brick-and-mortar stores and e-commerce site. This allowed us to identify and resolve integration issues that were causing stock discrepancies, leading to a 70% reduction in the staff hours spent manually reconciling inventory levels between the systems.

Service experience

Retailers don’t measure success by server uptime—they measure it by business outcomes. That means ensuring smooth POS operations during peak hours, batch jobs that finish in time to update inventory, and a seamless e-commerce experience that reduces checkout abandonment. Yet mid-market retailers often remain stuck with traditional IT SLAs that don’t align with these real-world metrics. The shift is toward KPIs that actually reflect the business impact of technology performance.

Logic’s approach We collaborate with you to define and track KPIs that reflect true retail impact. Instead of just measuring ticket resolution time, we measure the impact of incidents on store trading hours or online order processing. We report on the successful deployment rate of planned promotions within your merchandising system or the accuracy of inventory synchronization across channels. This ensures our managed services are directly contributing to your business success metrics.
A retail success story For a mid‑market apparel brand, we shifted SLA focus from “ticket close time” to “order‑to‑ship elapsed time”. By aligning monitoring, support queues, and batch‑job windows to that KPI, holiday order lag fell 20% resulting in a boost to revenues.

Observability

Complexity is deceptive, and many small and mid-tier retailers underestimate what a lack of monitoring does to their daily operations. Complexity exists even without massive scale. Ensuring seamless data flow from POS transactions to inventory updates, financial reconciliation, and customer analytics requires visibility across multiple systems. Identifying bottlenecks in the order fulfillment process (from web order capture to WMS processing to shipping confirmation) is crucial. Security monitoring needs to be tailored to retail-specific threats (e.g., protecting customer data, ensuring PCI compliance).

Logic’s approach We implement observability solutions that provide a unified view of your critical retail workflows. This means dashboards that track the health of your entire transaction path, from POS or website performance to payment gateway interaction to order confirmation. It involves setting up alerts that trigger not just on system failures, but on performance degradation that could impact the customer experience (e.g., slow product page loads) or business operations (e.g., delays in transmitting sales data). We provide insights that allow for proactive tuning and capacity planning, especially vital before anticipated peak periods.
A retail success story For a clothing retailer, we deployed Elastic‑based, end‑to‑end traces across POS → OMS → WMS. Stock‑level mistransfers that once took merch teams hours to diagnose are now surfaced in real time; manual reconciliation effort is down 70%, and out‑of‑stock‑online but in‑store incidents have dropped by half.

Talent

Upskilling and deep technical expertise are table stakes—but mid-market IT teams are typically stretched thin, juggling generalist demands across a patchwork of platforms. Hiring for deep knowledge of systems like Oracle Retail or Salesforce can be costly and time-consuming. Yet without that expertise, retailers struggle to evolve or optimize their environments.

Logic’s approach As part of Accenture, we offer access to a global pool of talent with specific retail technology expertise, something Logic couldn’t provide at the same scale. This means we can bring in deep functional or technical knowledge for specific platforms when you need it – for complex troubleshooting, upgrade planning, or strategic advice. Crucially, we also focus on partnership and knowledge transfer, working alongside your team to upskill them on new tools, processes (like Agile or DevOps), and platform enhancements, strengthening your internal capabilities over time.
A retail success story For a footwear brand, facing a skills gap in a new digital platform and Oracle RMS, we embedded two platform specialists and ran capability‑build sprints with store‑ops IT staff. Within six months their own team was closing tickets without escalations and outside contractor spend was substantially reduced.

Lessons learned and best practices

At Logic, we know retailers. We know how to help build lean IT organizations that can adapt to wild shifts in the market. Here are some of our key lessons from our Run To New projects:

  1. Start small, scale fast: Begin with a single building block (e.g., observability or AI automation) as a pilot. Demonstrate ROI in 3–6 months, then expand to adjacent areas.
  2. Align on outcomes: Early alignment workshops with both IT and business stakeholders ensure that run and change targets map to real revenue or customer experience metrics.
  3. Invest in culture: Technical automation alone won’t succeed without a culture that values data-driven decision-making and continuous learning. Leadership buy-in is critical.
  4. Tailor to retail rhythms: Incorporate high-season planning (e.g., back-to-school, holiday) into your change calendar. Automate rollback and failover scenarios to minimize risk during peak traffic.
  5. Measure twice, automate once: Comprehensive service experience KPIs provide guardrails—preventing “automation for its own sake” and ensuring every improvement drives business value.

Getting started

Run to New isn’t a slogan—it’s a commitment to turn the “run” budget you already spend into the engine that funds your next wave of retail innovation. By rightsizing cloud foundations, automating the grind out of support, and tying every KPI to revenue or customer experience, we’ve shown midmarket retailers how managed services can pay for modernization instead of postponing it. With Accenture’s scale and Logic’s retail DNA, you no longer have to choose between stability and change—you get both, on a timeline that matches your seasonal rhythms and growth goals. Let’s move your run to new, together.

As Global Director, Logic, Part of Accenture, Tony helps our clients establish the robust cloud platforms they need to power the next-generation customer experiences. He brings more than two decades of experience in cloud and managed services. Tony has served as a vCTO/vCIO for several major entertainment and media companies.

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