Growing a retail footprint fast is supposed to be a good problem to have. But ask anyone running store operations during a period of rapid expansion, and they’ll tell you it exposes every crack in the technology holding the business together. New locations open faster than IT can support them. Staff spend more time wrestling with disconnected tools than serving customers. And the systems meant to make operations easier start to feel like the thing slowing everyone down.
That’s exactly the tension Danish retailer Normal faced. In under three years, the company grew from 551 to over 1,000 stores across 12 countries, roughly a new store every 38 hours. At a time when many retailers were closing physical locations and shifting online, Normal was doing the opposite, investing in its in-store experience while trying to keep pace with its own growth. The technology challenge wasn’t abstract. It was about deploying new in-store solutions fast enough to avoid becoming the bottleneck on the business itself.
The Operational Pressure Points Unique to Food, Retail, and Consumer Goods
Retail, food, and consumer goods organizations face a specific set of operational demands that generic software rarely accommodates well. Multi-location inventory visibility, supply chain coordination across vendors and warehouses, food safety and traceability compliance, seasonal demand swings, and the expectation of fast, consistent customer experiences across every channel all have to work together, often across dozens or hundreds of locations at once.
Normal’s own challenge captures this well. With a relatively small IT department, the company’s existing mobile app for daily store operations had reached its limits, and staff were spending too much time behind a computer instead of with customers. The company needed the flexibility to respond fast, pivot when circumstances changed, and refocus effort where it created the most value, all without slowing down the pace of new store openings. That’s the same tension most retail and consumer goods organizations face: the business moves quickly, and the systems supporting it need to move at least as fast.
Custom Applications That Connect Store, Warehouse, and Corporate Systems
The most effective fix for this tension isn’t another point solution. It’s a single platform that consolidates the many small, disconnected tools frontline staff rely on every day. Real-time inventory and replenishment apps, store operations and task management tools, supplier and vendor onboarding portals, quality control and traceability tracking for food safety compliance, and customer loyalty or personalization tools all fall into this category, and all benefit from being built around how a specific business actually operates rather than a generic template.
Normal’s “Store App,” built on OutSystems, shows what this looks like at scale. The app lets employees find items, track expiry dates, count stock, print shelf labels, and manage store opening hours, all from a single mobile interface available in 12 languages. It’s now used by more than 12,000 employees across 12 countries and manages 95% of daily store operations. The greatest advantage of the Store App is that it handles many different functions and system integrations in just one platform, rather than forcing staff to juggle several disconnected tools throughout a shift.
Where AI Agents Create the Most Value in Retail and Consumer Goods Operations
Once the operational foundation is in place, AI agents tend to deliver the fastest wins in the back-office processes that quietly consume the most staff time. Normal’s experience with OutSystems Agent Workbench is a strong example of how quickly this can happen. When the company needed a way to facilitate communication across the many countries where it operates, it built a working translation agent in a single hour.
From there, Normal moved to a more complex challenge: invoice processing. B2B customers had been submitting receipt images that the finance team processed manually, a workflow that could take several days. The invoice agent Normal built now extracts structured data from those receipt images, automatically reconciles it with the ERP, and gives customers an immediate response. The finance team handles roughly 300 of these cases every month, and the agent removed a significant amount of manual work, freeing staff for more valuable tasks while giving customers faster feedback.
What stands out about Normal’s approach is the philosophy behind it. Many businesses use agentic AI to automate everything in stores and reduce headcount, but that wasn’t Normal’s goal. The company views AI as a way to work in the background, supporting staff with their daily routines and operations rather than replacing human interaction with customers. That distinction matters for any retail or consumer goods organization thinking about where AI agents fit, especially in a business built around face-to-face customer service.
Modernizing Legacy POS, Inventory, and Supply Chain Systems Without Starting Over
Very few retail or consumer goods companies have the option of replacing their core POS, inventory, or ERP systems outright. These systems are too deeply embedded in daily operations, and the risk of disruption is too high. Normal’s experience shows the more practical path: build a modern layer on top of the systems already in place rather than tearing them out.
Normal’s Store App integrates directly with Microsoft Business Central, the company’s core ERP, and syncs with more than 4,000 handheld terminals across country-specific ERP databases, processing millions of data points in just 15 minutes, a task that used to take 8 hours with the previous system. Updating shelf labels, once a 10-minute task, now takes 8 seconds. None of this required replacing Normal’s core systems. It required building a faster, more capable layer connected to them.
Building Governance Into Fast-Moving Retail Environments
Governance tends to get treated as an afterthought in fast-moving retail environments, but it matters more here, not less. When different teams across stores, e-commerce, and supply chain each adopt their own AI tools without coordination, organizations end up with the retail equivalent of shadow IT: inconsistent access controls, fragmented audit trails, and no clear picture of what’s actually running across the business.
Normal’s approach offers a useful model for avoiding that outcome. Rather than deploying agents everywhere at once, the company scaled deliberately, starting with a single translation agent and expanding to six agents over time, including a chatbot and a shelf label extractor, each addressing a specific operational need. That kind of controlled, incremental rollout, built on one platform with consistent governance, is a more sustainable path than a wave of disconnected pilots that never quite make it into production.
How Optimum Helps Retail and Consumer Goods Companies Build and Govern AI with OutSystems
As an official OutSystems partner, Optimum brings the same kind of broader context to retail and consumer goods engagements that Normal relied on. Our experience spans AI consulting and governance, data and analytics for demand forecasting and reporting, Make for supply chain automation, and Microsoft 365 integrations that connect frontline and corporate teams. That means an OutSystems application or agent Optimum builds is never developed in isolation. It’s designed to connect cleanly to the ERP, POS, and supply chain systems your business already runs on, and governed with the same rigor across every engagement.
Whether you’re looking to consolidate fragmented store operations, modernize a legacy inventory or POS system, or scale AI agents responsibly across your organization, Optimum has the strategic and technical depth to get you there.
About Optimum
Optimum is a nationally recognized IT consulting firm and official partner of OutSystems, Microsoft, Make.ai, ServiceNow, and other leading enterprise platforms, dedicated to helping organizations build, deploy, and govern AI-powered applications and agents that deliver measurable business outcomes.
We focus on driving efficiency, reducing operational costs, and supporting digital transformation through an assessment-led, partnership-driven approach. Our expertise spans legacy modernization, AI agent design, workflow automation, data and analytics, and enterprise platform implementation. We help organizations automate work and ensure that work is grounded in clean data and surfaces in the reporting environments leadership actually uses to make decisions.
Reach out today for a complimentary discovery session to explore how Optimum can help your organization build and govern enterprise AI the right way with OutSystems.
Contact us: info@optimumcs.com | 713.505.0300 | www.optimumcs.com
