$750 million here. Another $490 million there.

Amazon is pouring billions into its physical and digital retail infrastructure in Australia, investing at a scale that few, if any, retailers can match.

But they’re not the only ones investing. As competition rises, customer expectations surge, and margin pressure intensifies, local retailers are pouring money into their supply chain infrastructure.

Shippit research shows that supply chain optimisation is the number one investment priority for local retailers in FY26.

But not all of those investments will succeed. Some will stall, and the cause is almost never the technology itself. Whether a digital transformation runs to timeline or blows out depends on what happens in the weeks and months before the first order is shipped.

In this week’s Delivered, Noemi Millares, Head of Implementation at Shippit, highlights what separates a four-week implementation from a four-month one, and why the difference is almost never technical.

TL;DR

• Supply chain optimisation is the top investment priority for ANZ retailers in FY26, but McKinsey research suggests 70% of digital transformations fail to meet their goals.
• Most implementation delays and failures are locked in before Meeting 1 - through misalignment and unclear ownership.

Why do digital transformations fail?

Australian retailers are spending more on supply chain technology than ever.

When asked what would be their biggest investment focus in FY26, 20.7% said supply chain optimisation - almost twice as much as the year before, when it was a priority for only 12% of retailers.

However, not all of those digital transformations will succeed. McKinsey research suggests that as many as 70% of digital transformations fail to achieve their intended goal.

If 70% of digital transformations struggle, how can you avoid being another expensive statistic?

While few can match Amazon’s spend, every retailer is competing against the expectations it sets. That makes implementation and execution, not investment, the real differentiator.

A failed digital transformation doesn’t mean ‘system down’. Instead, it’s in timelines that blow out, adoption that stalls, and platforms that go live but take too long to reach their potential.

That means carriers enabled but routing rules not optimised, delivery estimates that are still inflated at checkout, and warehouse teams reverting to the old process that the new platform was supposed to replace.

More often than not, Noemi says, the causes are organisational rather than technical. Think poor planning, siloed departments, neglected change management, and no project owner.

“Where we find implementations start to really hit roadblocks is when there isn't that upfront alignment,” Noemi says. “Often you'll see one person involved in the buying of a platform, who has a very specific goal.

“But the person responsible for getting it up and running may not have been involved in that initial sales cycle, and comes into it with their own view of what they want to get out of it.

“The stakeholder who is brought in the latest or the least often would probably be your warehouse ops staff. The ones who are on the ground, using the platform day to day. They'll be brought in very late in the process to say, ‘Have we built this right?'.

When they’re engaged as an afterthought, the result is often scepticism, reluctance, and a lack of engagement.

What do effective implementations do differently?

If the failure pattern is predictable, so too is the success pattern. And it starts earlier than most retailers expect.

“A very prepared merchant has a few things under their belts," Noemi says. “First and foremost, they will have already given the relevant teams across their business a heads up on what they are planning to do.”

That sounds elementary. It isn't.

The number of teams affected by a logistics platform change is larger than most project owners expect: warehouse, logistics, store teams, ecommerce, IT, marketing, finance.

At the very minimum, Noemi says, each should be briefed and consulted: “here is what we are implementing, here is what it means for your team, here is what we expect from you”.

The second factor is carrier readiness. The merchants that run into trouble come in saying they want to enable three carriers, only to discover mid-build that one of those accounts is not finalised.

“Making sure that the carriers you do put forward are actually ready to go is probably the most underrated piece of prep," Noemi continues.

But the factor that matters most is project ownership.

The cost of getting it wrong

Consider the retailer that signs a contract to optimise their supply chain in August, targeting a go-live in late October, just weeks before Black Friday.

The vision is strategic, the technology is sound, and the sales process is smooth. But the warehouse team isn't briefed until week three. The carrier accounts aren’t finalised until a week later. And without a project owner, decisions bounce between IT, operations, or whoever isn’t on annual leave.

You know where this is going, right?

By mid-October, the timeline has blown out. Go-live creeps into early December. The retailer tackles Black Friday on its old system, with the old routing rules, old carrier mix, and old delivery estimates.

Christmas runs on a half-adopted platform with teams working through teething issues at the busiest time of the year. Delivery promises slip, WISMO enquiries spike, and consumers (64% of whom would not return to a brand after a poor delivery experience) shop elsewhere.

That’s the importance of implementation.

“It's not about having everything figured out," Noemi says. “It's about having the right conversations before you kick off the process."