THE GROUNDWORK
25 years in the field
This is not built on a spreadsheet. It is built on a quarter-century of on-the-ground work across five continents — mapping, testing and validating the players that define front-end retail execution, one company at a time.
Why this market resists the obvious
THE LANDSCAPE
Front-end retail execution is one of the few technology markets on earth never consolidated — roughly 1,300 vendors worldwide, most regional, most invisible, all promising the same outcome. No analyst firm covers it properly. The major analysts track around twenty vendors under 'retail execution,' and those twenty don't even do the same thing.
THE BLIND SPOT
For the Consumer Goods companies who depend on it, choosing the right technology is closer to a lottery than a decision: evaluation processes too shallow to separate real capability from positioning; no exhaustive trials, because setup is intensive and expensive; and no meaningful benchmarks, because every company runs its own route-to-market and no two are comparable. The result is a high-stakes choice made with low-quality information.
THE COST
And the cost of getting it wrong is staggering. Industry estimates put the annual waste of poor execution at roughly US$1.23 trillion. For a single company, the wrong platform means a lost year, a seven-figure write-off, and an internal credibility hit that lingers.
How this knowledge was built — from four vantage points almost no single person occupies at once
Understanding this market well enough to advise on it, to map it, and to architect its consolidation required more than analysis. It required living it, from every side:
1 — As operator & buyer.
Selecting, buying and living with execution technology inside global Consumer Goods companies — PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, Mars, Bauducco — feeling firsthand where tools succeed and fail in real operations, and where the money is quietly lost.
THE FIELD INTELLIGENCE
A map of who is real
From an estimated 1,300 vendors worldwide, this work mapped and assessed the majority — and identified the 219 that genuinely deliver: those whose work has been verified directly, that cover both the capitals and the interior of their markets.
This map makes a distinction no other source does: presence is recorded where a vendor genuinely operates, not where it claims to.
This is the field intelligence that underwrites everything else — the advisory, the data, and the consolidation model. It is the difference between an opinion about a market and a position grounded in it.
What this groundwork underwrites
Twenty-five years of fieldwork is not an end in itself. It is what makes three things possible:
2 — As builder & peer.
Founding and scaling execution technology across more than 50 countries. Founder of Scanntech Brazil, a Sequoia Latin America portfolio company. Seeing these solutions from the inside, and knowing many of their owners personally.
3 — As field evaluator.
Running real battle analyses and fit-gap assessments in the field, testing competing vendors side by side in live client operations — where performance shows itself at its most explicit source, not in a sales deck.
4 — As market architect.
Since 2022, assessing vendors against the most demanding bar there is: their potential within a global consolidation. This meant visiting more than 100 vendors and independently validating their claims with their own clients.
Advisory that is not guesswork. When a Consumer Goods company must choose an execution platform, the verdict comes from having seen these tools work and fail in the field — not from a vendor briefing.
Intelligence that cannot be searched for. The Execution Map exists because someone spent a quarter-century eliminating the other thousand vendors. That elimination is the product.
A consolidation model built by an operator. Knowing which of 1,300 vendors are real, where they actually operate, and who owns them, is the precondition for consolidating this market — and the reason a fund would sponsor an operator to lead it.