Purchase Order Management: Powering Retail Resilience

In today’s fast‑moving retail landscape, supply chains are under unprecedented pressure and the commercial risks are escalating. Customer expectations continue to rise, product cycles are accelerating, and volatility is the new normal in global trade. Against this backdrop, Purchase Order Management is emerging as a critical enabler for retailers looking to regain control, strengthen resilience and create true end-to-end visibility across their supply chain.

Turning Purchase Orders into a Strategic Advantage

At its core, Purchase Order Management brings together the full orchestration of a retailer’s inbound supply chain. From supplier coordination and transportation planning to inventory visibility and final delivery, it integrates physical logistics with digital oversight, allowing retailers to manage complexity, reduce fragmentation and optimise flows across multiple touchpoints.

For retailers, this isn’t just a process upgrade - it’s a strategic superpower that turns purchase orders into a source of control, forecasting accuracy and operational efficiency.

How Retail Became Europe’s Logistics Growth Driver

As retail and e-commerce markets continue to grow at pace across Europe, the logistics infrastructure that powers them has had to transform just as quickly. Automation is becoming standard in major distribution centres, and retailers are increasingly turning to integrated, tech-enabled solutions that can keep up with rising customer expectations and more efficient fulfilment cycles.

This shift explains how retail has moved from being a traditional logistics customer to becoming one of the most influential engines of growth in the European market. It’s also why logistics partners with true end-to-end capabilities are now best positioned to support retailers as the sector evolves, accelerates and becomes more complex.

Strong Foundations in Retail Logistics

We support substantial retail flows across Europe through a fast-growing freight forwarding and multimodal network that spans around 300 locations and covers more than 90% of global trade lanes. Our logistics footprint has scaled rapidly and underscores the pivotal role logistics plays in our global strategy.

This scale and capability give us a strong foundation to expand our Purchase Order Management offering and support retail customers with agile, resilient supply chain solutions built for a market that’s evolving faster than ever.

How We’re Delivering for Retailers

Through our Purchase Order Management solution, powered by the Infor Nexus platform, we help retailers coordinate sourcing, suppliers, transport and replenishment with real-time visibility and predictive insights. This unified approach reduces delays, strengthens supplier performance, and improves on-time delivery by giving buyers live tracking, automated updates and proactive exception alerts.

Across Europe, we reinforce these capabilities with a fast-growing physical and digital network. Our freight forwarding footprint forms part of a global system of more than 300 logistics offices, supported by priority port access and integrated multimodal connectivity that simplify even the most complex supply chains. Together, our people, assets and technology create the foundations for true lead logistics delivery - integrating inland, port and final-mile movements into one coherent flow that improves reliability, efficiency and resilience for our retail customers.

Protecting Retail Relationships and Revenue

Retailers today face a supply chain environment unfortunately defined by disruption. Climate events, geopolitical tensions and capacity volatility have made predictability harder than ever. In 2025 alone, major trade routes experienced significant disruption - including the Red Sea crisis which diverted 55% of ocean capacity and created a cascade of impacts across global supply chains. Our global presence plays a critical role in strengthening retail resilience, enabling faster decision-making and greater agility when disruption strikes. By being close to both sourcing markets and end customers, we help retailers adapt quickly, maintain continuity, and deliver reliably - no matter where goods are coming from or where they need to go.

Against this backdrop, Purchase Order Management strengthens our ability to protect customer relationships by offering predictable delivery, integrated visibility, and proactive exception management. It ensures retailers have the assurance, reliability and decision-ready data they need - especially when trading conditions are unstable.

Building a Simpler, Seamless Solution

A key building block in our ambition to deliver a fully integrated supply chain solution, Purchase Order Management connects purchase orders, origin operations, freight, inland transport, warehousing, and final delivery into a single, unified experience.

This simplifies the customer journey, reduces the need for multiple partners, and aligns with market trends, where over 60% of European companies now use AI-driven tools for inventory management and route optimisation.

By connecting the dots from factory floor to customer door, we can unlock new levels of transparency and control for retailers - removing friction, strengthening predictability, and enabling decisions that keep pace with a rapidly changing retail landscape.

Strengthening Long‑term Customer Partnerships

Retailers increasingly tend to prefer logistics partners who can manage the full supply chain beyond isolated activities. Integrated, data-rich solutions create stronger, longer-term customer relationships by reducing friction, removing complexity and making it easier for retailers to scale and adapt.

This approach aligns directly with our strategy to expand our global logistics footprint, supported by major investments that helped the company surpass 100 million TEUs of container capacity in 2024, and grow our freight forwarding network to cover over 90% of global trade lanes.

By bringing these capabilities together under one coordinated solution, we can deliver greater value, more predictability, and stronger partnerships - embedding ourselves deeper in customers’ supply chains in a market where integration increasingly defines competitive advantage.

A Strategic Step Forward for Our Logistics Ambitions

Purchase Order Management isn’t a standalone initiative. It represents a decisive step in our evolution from a port operator to a global, fully integrated logistics leader. Crucially, it strengthens our ability to deliver value precisely where retailers need it most.

And the timing couldn’t be more important. The European logistics market is forecast to exceed 1.19 trillion USD by 2030, underscoring the scale of the opportunity ahead and the growing demand for partners who can connect every part of the supply chain seamlessly.

We are positioning ourselves - and our customers - to thrive in a market that is becoming bigger, faster, and more complex every year.

Find out more about our Purchase Order Management Solutions.