What stayed with me wasn't a slide. It was the hunger in the room. In a market that moves this fast, responsiveness to change is what separates the retailers who lead from the ones who follow, and that is a principle we live by at YDISTRI, from the inventory side, every single day.
Last week we were back inside SAP's global headquarters in Walldorf, this time for the LATAM edition of Transformation Week 2026, hosted on SAP's own campus rather than a rented conference hall. Seven countries. More than 25 companies. One shared agenda: accelerate. A full week, organized top to bottom by Felix Rubio Romero, and built for retailers who wanted more than a keynote. They wanted to see how European retail actually runs, up close.
The outcome that mattered most
The strongest signal from the week wasn't a new product. It was a mindset. SAP built the entire agenda around transformation as a continuous capability, not a project with a finish line. That distinction matters more than it sounds. Most retail transformations still get funded, scoped, and closed out like a renovation: a before, a during, an after, a ribbon cutting.
Inventory imbalance does not work that way. A store sells out of a product on Tuesday while the same item sits untouched three towns over. That is not a one-time problem you fix and file away. It is a permanent condition of running hundreds or thousands of stores against demand that shifts weekly, sometimes daily. Treating transformation as a muscle instead of a milestone is the only model that actually matches how retail behaves.
Where YDISTRI fits next to SAP
We had the honor of showcasing at the S.MART Experience Center on the Walldorf campus, standing inside SAP's own Retail Intelligence ecosystem alongside the SAP team presenting the broader vision. What I said in the room, and what I still believe after a week of walking real stores, is this:
YDISTRI fills the gap that even the best demand planning can't eliminate: selling inventory that ends up in the wrong place, at full price.
That gap is structural, not a planning failure. Demand forecasting predicts what a region, a chain, or a season will need in aggregate. It was never built to catch the individual SKU that lands in the wrong store the week a local trend shifts. That is a second allocation problem, not a forecasting one. Once stock is on the shelf and the plan and reality start to diverge, someone has to move it, fast, before it turns into a markdown.
DOUGLAS is the clearest proof of this working in practice, and it is not a hypothetical. We walked their stores in person that same week. Stock DOUGLAS redistributed through YDISTRI sold through at 81%, and working capital tied up in overstock dropped 12%, without adding a single euro of new buying. Predictive planning got the inventory into the country. Second allocation got it into the hands of a customer who actually wanted it.
That is not two systems bolted together. It's one complete solution: SAP plans, YDISTRI responds, and the customer never sees the seam. Walldorf was the room where we got to show that working end to end, not just describe it.
Where retail is headed
The part of the week I keep coming back to is who was in the room. Retailers did not fly from Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Chile, Argentina, Panama, and Peru to sit through a conference. They came to walk DOUGLAS, REWE, and Kaufland floors in person, ask direct questions, and take home what years of trial and error already taught European retailers the hard way.
That is the real shift happening in retail right now. The gap between "we are planning to adopt AI-driven inventory tools" and "we already run on them" is closing faster than most transformation roadmaps assume, because retailers watching from a few years behind are no longer willing to relearn every lesson from scratch. They are adopting predictive and responsive capability in parallel, not in sequence, because the cost of waiting compounds faster than the cost of moving early.
That is a good problem for our industry to have.
Thanks, and what's next
Thank you to Felix Rubio Romero for curating a week that gave more than 25 companies something worth crossing an ocean for, and to the SNP team, especially Soledad Alcaraz, for the flawless organization that made it all feel effortless.
Thank you to Dr. Christoph Schroeder and Florian Roeder for the partnership and for building an ecosystem where the pieces genuinely fit together that is not something you take for granted.
And a sincere thank you to Dmitry Proskurin at DOUGLAS, Till Malurdy at REWE, and Dennis Hodel at Kaufland for the openness during the store visits, the conversations that happened on those floors went well beyond the tour itself.
If you want the full story behind the numbers above, straight from the people who lived it, we sat down with the DOUGLAS team to talk it through in detail.