A Smarter Path to Omnichannel Retail Promotion Planning

Promotion planning has always been a strategic pillar of retail, but in today’s omnichannel retail world, it has become exponentially more complex. Retailers must coordinate pricing, product mix, timing, inventory, store retail operations, digital activation, loyalty, and competitive activity across an expanding landscape of consumer touchpoints.

Omnichannel retail complexity, demand volatility, and siloed retail operations are widening the gap between strategy and execution, often in ways retailers can’t afford.

At the same time, margins are tightening and planning cycles are accelerating. Industry data underscores the pressure to plan and execute successful promotions:

• Omnichannel shoppers spend 1.5x more per month than single-channel shoppers (Grocery Doppio), increasing the financial impact of every promotional decision.
• 73% of consumers engage with six or more touchpoints before completing a purchase (Uniform Market), raising the bar for synchronized, real-time execution.

The opportunity is significant, but so is the exposure. The stakes have never been higher, and yet the systems and processes supporting promotions haven’t kept pace with the speed and complexity of modern retail.

Why Promotion Planning Has Become So Hard, Now More Than Ever

Though promotion planning has always been demanding, several converging forces are making it significantly harder for retailers to execute with confidence:

• A rapidly expanding channel landscape
  Promotions must activate consistently across stores, ecommerce, marketplaces, social commerce, loyalty apps, mobile experiences, and retail media networks. 
• Unprecedented demand volatility
  More than half of retailers cite consumer demand uncertainty as their top challenge, complicating lift forecasting, inventory planning, and product availability. 
• Persistent supply chain instability
  Fluctuating lead times and regional disruptions create vulnerabilities that can derail even the most carefully planned campaigns.
• Faster execution cycles
  What once took weeks must now be deployed in days or hours. Promotion planning has become one of the most complex, time-sensitive, and high-stakes responsibilities in retail. 

Where Promotion Planning Breaks Down Inside Retail Teams

These external challenges are only part of the story. Many retailers still rely on outdated workflows, disconnected systems, and manual processes that weren’t built for the pace of omnichannel retail. Inside the organization—across tools, handoffs, and teams—is where promotions most often break down.

1. Siloed Planning Across Teams

Teams often build plans in spreadsheets or disconnected calendars. Merchandising, pricing, marketing, supply chain, and retail operations all work from different tools and timelines. Budgets are tracked manually. Teams struggle to see how their plans impact one another.

The result: misaligned budgets, conflicting campaigns, approval delays, and slow reaction times.

2. Heavy-Lift Offer Setup

 Offer planning demands accuracy and speed, but most organizations face:

• Inconsistent product data, including reactive category and assortment actions
• Inconsistent pricing data
• Manual upload and maintenance
• Repetitive rekeying
• Fragmented calculation engines

Even basic promotions require unnecessary effort and introduce operational risk.

3. Execution Gaps in the Real World

This is where promotions often fail. Every retailer knows the scenario:

• Stock arrives late
• The wrong inventory hits stores
• Shelf labels don’t match POS
• Online offers and in-store pricing are disconnected (omnichannel retail friction)
• Digital channels activate at the wrong time
• Stores don’t have staffing aligned to the promotion
• Suppliers aren’t synchronized

In other words, the campaign is perfect until it hits the real world. Execution misalignment erodes margins and marketing return on investment (ROI), but the highest cost is customer trust. Repeated frustration—especially in an omnichannel retail environment—dismantles the brand loyalty that is critical for long-term success.

4. Limited In-Flight Visibility

Many retailers lack real-time insight into store conditions, demand signals, and digital performance. Without early warning indicators, teams cannot adjust their promotion midflight or respond to emerging issues. 

Shaping the Future of Promotion Planning with Syntax and SAP

For decades, Syntax, an SAP Platinum Partner, has helped global retailers modernize and optimize their technology landscapes with SAP solutions from SAP Cloud ERP for Retail and SAP Commerce Cloud to SAP Customer Activity Repository (CAR), SAP Omnichannel POS by GK, SAP Omnichannel Pricing and Promotion Service, and the wider SAP ecosystem.

This work has given us a clear view into the operational realities retailers face and the increasing complexity of managing promotions across channels. SAP offers an exceptionally strong retail foundation—cloud-native architecture, embedded analytics, AI-ready infrastructure, and proven pricing and promotion calculation engines.

The next chapter of promotion planning builds on this foundation with deeper integration, broader visibility, and more intelligent orchestration across the business. Combining SAP’s industry-leading retail solutions with Syntax’s domain expertise and integration capabilities helps retailers achieve:

• Improved visibility and coordinated planning workflows
• Consistent cross-channel execution
• Faster, insight-driven decisions
• Lower operational burden from disconnected systems
• Greater execution reliability through supply chain integration
• Better understanding of promotion lift and ROI
• A unified approach to omnichannel retail promotion planning

Together, we’re focused on helping retailers build more connected, data-driven, and resilient promotion-planning processes, enabling the intelligence required for the future of omnichannel retail.

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