The process that finally got replaced
Kramp Poland, a supplier of agricultural, forestry, and gardening products, has completed a rollout of LEAFIO's Shelf Efficiency software across 40 of its stores, digitizing a planogram workflow that had remained almost entirely manual. Before the deployment, every planogram update required merchandising staff to physically build the shelf layout at headquarters, photograph the finished arrangement, print copies, and mail or courier them out to individual store locations. Store staff then had to interpret a static photo against whatever was actually on their shelves.
That process is not unusual for mid-size retail and B2B distribution networks, and its persistence into 2026 is itself the story. Digitizing planogram distribution is one of the more mundane items on a typical retail modernization roadmap, easy to deprioritize behind AI shopping assistants or checkout automation, but it is also foundational: a retailer cannot reliably automate replenishment or shelf-compliance auditing on top of a process that still runs through printed photographs and physical mail.
Why this retailer's scale makes the case
Kramp Poland's network includes more than 160 PbK partner stores, each carrying between 8,000 and 21,000 SKUs, with up to 90,000 active SKUs across the full network when combined with Kramp-owned locations and Grene-affiliated stores. At that assortment complexity, a manual, photograph-and-mail planogram process does not scale linearly, it breaks down: keeping 160-plus stores' shelf layouts consistent with a headquarters-built master plan becomes practically impossible once SKU counts climb into the tens of thousands, since any single product change requires re-photographing and re-distributing the entire affected layout.
That scale threshold is the useful data point for other multi-format or partner-store retailers evaluating their own planogram tooling. A single-format chain with a few dozen SKUs per category can often tolerate a manual process far longer than a distributor like Kramp, whose store formats range from Kramp-owned to franchise-style PbK partners to Grene-affiliated locations, each potentially running a different subset of the full 90,000-SKU catalog. That format diversity is exactly the condition under which a manual, headquarters-driven process breaks down fastest and most visibly.
What the digital workflow actually changes
With Shelf Efficiency in place, planograms are created, updated, and distributed centrally, and store employees pull current layouts through a mobile application rather than waiting for a printed copy to arrive. Beata Jarosz, Head of Retail Poland at Kramp, described the shift in direct operational terms: the software gives the retail network a single, consistent way to build and roll out planograms, replacing what had been a fragmented, location-by-location interpretation of static photos.
The mobile-first distribution model also closes a specific gap that paper processes cannot: version control. A photographed planogram mailed to a store has no mechanism for confirming the store is looking at the current version rather than one superseded by a later update. A centrally managed digital system removes that ambiguity by construction, since store staff are always pulling from the same live source rather than whatever printout last arrived in the mail.
The next phase is where the real payoff sits
Kramp has already selected LEAFIO's Inventory Optimisation module as its next implementation phase, which will integrate planogram data directly with replenishment forecasting at the store and SKU level. That sequencing, shelf digitization first, inventory forecasting second, reflects a common and defensible pattern in retail technology rollouts: forecasting accuracy depends on knowing what should be on the shelf in the first place, so digitizing the planogram layer first gives the inventory optimization layer a clean data foundation to build on rather than trying to forecast against inconsistent shelf data.
For a CIO evaluating a similar rollout, that sequencing is the transferable lesson more than the specific vendor choice. Attempting inventory optimization or automated replenishment on top of a shelf layout process that is still manually distributed and inconsistently followed store to store tends to produce forecasts that look precise on a dashboard but rest on an unreliable assumption about what is actually stocked where, which undermines the credibility of the forecasting investment before it has a real chance to prove its value.
The build-versus-buy backdrop
LEAFIO is a specialist retail-technology vendor rather than a division of a larger enterprise software suite, and Kramp's choice to adopt a dedicated planogram and inventory platform rather than build the capability internally or bolt it onto an existing ERP module reflects a pattern common among mid-size retailers and distributors: category-specific point solutions still win against in-house builds when the underlying workflow, in this case shelf layout management, is not the retailer's core differentiator.
That calculus shifts for larger retailers with the scale to justify in-house merchandising software, but for a distributor managing partner and franchise formats across a range of ownership structures, a vendor platform that already handles the complexity of multi-format rollouts is typically the faster and lower-risk path than a custom internal build, particularly when the near-term goal is simply eliminating a paper-based process rather than building a differentiated capability the business can compete on directly.
The takeaway for other multi-format retailers
Kramp Poland's rollout is not a flashy AI story, and that is precisely why it is worth a CIO's attention. Retail technology coverage skews heavily toward AI shopping assistants and agentic checkout, but a meaningful share of operational cost and shelf-compliance risk in multi-format retail still sits in unglamorous processes like planogram distribution that many organizations have not modernized simply because no single failure ever makes headlines the way a breach or an outage does, even though the cumulative cost compounds quietly across hundreds of stores every quarter.
Any retailer or distributor still running planogram updates through a photograph-and-print process should treat Kramp's 160-plus store, 90,000-SKU scale as a reasonable proxy for where manual processes stop scaling. The sequencing lesson, digitize shelf layout before attempting inventory forecasting on top of it, applies well beyond Kramp's specific vendor choice and is worth applying to any retailer's own modernization roadmap regardless of which platform they ultimately select to carry it out.
