How a Leading Retailer Built a Foundation for Retail Media Growth: Replacing a Fragmented Manual Stack with a Unified CRM, OMS, and Automated Deal-to-Cash Platform

Executive Summary

As enterprise Retail Media Networks (RMNs) expand, managing high-volume, supplier-funded campaigns across disconnected legacy platforms introduces severe operational risk. A top retailer managing hundreds of annual supplier-funded campaigns recognized that its spreadsheet-based operational stack would not effectively support continued growth and increasing transaction volumes.

By partnering with Boostr, the retailer replaced its fragmented, manual systems with a unified CRM and Order Management System (OMS) purpose-built for retail media. What made this deployment exceptional was its real-world complexity: the team navigated a complete mid-stream ad server migration, shifting financial workflows, and cross-functional inventory booking requirements — all without disrupting live campaign operations. The result is a flexible, end-to-end deal-to-cash workflow that safeguards campaign flighting, automates legal contracting, and is building toward fully automated ERP billing reconciliation.

The Challenge: Modernizing Legacy Operations and Disconnected Workflows

Prior to the transformation, the retailer’s rapidly growing retail media division managed its complex ecosystem with manual processes, offline communication channels, and a patchwork of localized spreadsheet trackers. Like many first-generation RMNs, the team was not in immediate crisis — but leadership proactively recognized the infrastructure would not survive the next phase of scale.

Siloed Account Visibility

• Sales lacked a centralized hub to track supplier strategies, sales assets, or live campaign metrics, causing tracking discrepancies and delays in supplier updates.
• No single source of truth: if a team member was out, there was no visibility into their accounts, pipeline, or work-in-progress.

High-Risk Handovers & Disconnected Teams

• Handovers between decentralized sales, ad operations, and technical activation teams relied on asynchronous emails and manual data transfers, leaving campaign schedules vulnerable to missed flights.
• Each channel had a separate owner with no shared system — making coordinated execution dependent on individual effort.

Cross-Functional Inventory Booking Complexity

• The team managed placements not only for external advertisers and suppliers but also coordinated with internal buying teams to lock in inventory across the organization — a complexity that spreadsheets could not reliably support.
• Without a centralized booking system, there was no mechanism to confirm that inventory reservations from either the sales team or internal marketing were actually locked.

Manual Planning & Capacity Bottlenecks

• Campaign setup and creative task tracking were configured manually. No standardized method existed to view real-time coordinator capacity, resulting in skewed resource allocation and delivery risk.

Disconnected Legal & Contract Revisions

• Proposal reviews and contract revisions occurred entirely outside the sales pipeline, forcing team members to ‘swivel-chair’ between multiple disconnected screens and systems.

Labor-Intensive Invoicing & Financial Reconciliation

• Finance manually audited campaigns across multiple sources and contract logs. Processing margin adjustments required manual data manipulation — a process highly error-prone as volume scaled.

Why Boostr

The retailer evaluated multiple platforms before selecting Boostr. The decision came down to three defining differentiators:

• Unified CRM + OMS in a single system — the primary requirement, and Boostr’s core product distinction. During the demo, the client’s leadership described the experience as ‘like a whole different ball game’ compared to any other platform they had evaluated.
• Reporting capabilities — live pipeline reporting, supplier and brand-level revenue views, and multi-dimensional campaign analytics generated clear ‘aha moments’ during the evaluation process.
• Integration flexibility — the team’s confidence in Boostr’s integrations team was a decisive factor, particularly for a retailer whose ad tech stack is still evolving. This confidence would prove well-founded when the client integrated their other systems with boostr.

Key Deployed Capabilities

Within the first month of implementation, the client’s CRM was successfully deployed, achieving a key business objective and establishing the foundation for future implementation phases.

The following platform capabilities have also been deployed and are actively used by the client’s teams:

‍Results & Business Impact

Following the CRM implementation, the retailer achieved operational improvements across all four dimensions of its retail media business:

Strategic Partnership Spotlight

The success of this implementation reflects more than a standard software deployment. From the first discovery call to ongoing platform co-development, the Boostr team has functioned as a true operational partner — adapting to shifting business requirements, evolving financial workflows, and the inherent complexity of building a retail media network from the ground up.

‍Consolidating our RMN workflow succeeded because this wasn’t a standard ‘client-vendor’ transaction but a true strategic partnership. The implementation team co-evolved the platform with us, rolling up their sleeves and going ‘above and beyond’ to connect all the complex operational dots for our model. —  Satisfied Client

This partnership model is increasingly a critical differentiator for RMNs that are still building their internal advertising expertise. As one Boostr team member described: “They came in knowing physical retail inside out. But being a publisher in the online advertising world is a completely different skill set — and that’s where the partnership really matters.”