Let me guess – your retail systems work just fine.

But ‘just fine’ is really another way of saying ‘good enough’.

The main culprit for the ‘just finers’ is the internal tool. Most often the case, built years ago by someone whose expertise, and enthusiasm, has since left. 

So you make do with a quirky, heavy-touch solution that does the job. 

And you stick with it. Because hey – it’s better than risking change, right?

Wrong.

I’ve been in enough rooms, on enough calls, and in enough decision-making loops to tell you ‘It works fine’ is costing you far more than you realize. Always. In money, in time, in missed sales – and in future potential you’ve quietly written off.

The problem with legacy logic

I recently spoke with a brand who’d been using a homegrown inventory tool – something cooked up in Excel macros a decent amount of years ago. The person who built it? Off to other adventures. The tool itself? Surprisingly (and unsurprisingly – there’s some serious talent out there) good. But also, totally manual, hard to scale, and impossible to maintain from both a technical perspective and the manual load it puts on teams.

The reality is, it bites them in the ass because it’s still so manual. It works, but can it work better? Heads down, brands and retailers have stopped asking the question.

That’s the danger. Once something becomes embedded in your process, especially if it doesn’t fail, you stop interrogating whether it’s helping you win. Whether it’s pushing you toward best-in-class, or quietly anchoring you to average.

‘Good enough’ is the enemy of better

Sticking with inventory management, excellence is elusive. There’s a science to it, sure, but there’s also an art. You’ll have good seasons and bad. Perfection isn’t the goal. But progress should be.

Most brands don’t act on it as a process. They’re not asking: what can we tweak, test, improve? They just let it run, distracted by the day-to-day busyness, and then wonder why they’re stuck. 

A bad season becomes a worse season, if you can’t learn from it.

Inventory is often treated like a back-office function. Something to keep running quietly. But in reality, it’s one of the most strategic levers in your business. Done well, it’s a revenue driver. Done badly, it’s a margin killer.

And here’s the kicker: most of the systems brands and retailers rely on were never built for this level of strategic impact.

The myth of saving money in-house

One of the biggest reasons brands and retailers keep legacy systems is cost. It’s cheaper to build it ourselves, they say.

But when you break down the true cost of ownership – the developers, the maintenance, the workarounds, the time it takes to get answers from static systems – it adds up. Fast.

I once ran the numbers, on average, it was 70% cheaper to go with a specialised tool than to build and maintain one in-house.

And that’s before you count the cost of lost sales from poor visibility. Or the time wasted re-running reports because something’s changed. Or the hidden overhead of decisions based on stale data.

When it’s profit or perish, that 70% could go a long way to securing your brand’s future.

What got you here won’t get you there

So, next time you hear our system works fine, stop and ask:

• Are we operating reactively – or strategically?

• Could we move faster, with better insights?

• Are we stuck in a mindset of maintenance, or are we designing for growth?

Sometimes, the thing holding you back isn’t failure. It’s comfort.

Ask the better question

There’s no shame in using systems that got you this far. In fact, they should be celebrated and recognized for the part they’ve played. But the tools that built your business aren’t always the ones that will scale it or secure its future.

When you’re deep in the day-to-day, it’s easy to prioritize what feels safe. But safe can quietly become stagnant.

You don’t need to overhaul everything overnight. But you do need to stay curious. Audit what’s working. Challenge what isn’t. And ask yourself regularly: is this helping us move forward – or just keeping us where we are?

Because in inventory, as in retail, standing still is rarely neutral. It’s usually just the first step to falling behind.