Chris Shortt, chief technology officer of Shoprite Group, says the retailer’s biggest current technology project is a rebuild of its core SAP retail platform, designed to give the group a real-time view of stock. He described the plan on TechCentral‘s Meet the CIO podcast, published on 9 September 2026 and produced in partnership with NTT DATA.
Shoprite is Africa’s largest retailer. Shortt’s aim is to meet shoppers “at their point of need, wherever that is”, whether a customer orders by voice through a home assistant or walks into a store to choose fresh produce and meat. He said the job is to blend the channels so that shopping works the way the customer wants it to, and not the way the retailer might prefer.
The SAP platform at the centre of the plan
SAP is the German software group whose enterprise systems run stock, pricing and supply-chain records for many large retailers. Shortt called the work on Shoprite’s SAP retail platform the largest technology project the group has running. The reason is the real-time inventory layer it is meant to create: one live record of what is on the shelf in each store and what can be promised online.
He also rejected the idea that this spells the end of the physical store. Shoprite’s store footprint, he said, remains “as alive and active as it has always been”. The technology is meant to serve the shops, not replace them.
Shortt said about 12,000 Shoprite employees now use generative AI at work. The company built its own gateway that picks the least expensive model able to handle each request. Product teams, he added, now pair one or two people with several AI agents. Elsewhere in the conversation he covered how the CIO role is changing, what the business expects of infrastructure, and how risk is discussed with the audit committee. The full episode is on SAP News Center Africa.
Delivery is driving the growth
Shoprite’s results for the 52 weeks to 28 June 2026 show how much of the group’s growth now runs through its app. According to Investing.com’s summary of the results presentation, group sales rose 7.2% to R270.8 billion, and diluted headline earnings per share grew 12.2% to 1,527.4 cents.
Checkers Sixty60, the on-demand delivery service, sold R25.5 billion over the year, up 34.7%. That was a record R6.6 billion in added sales, and the service now covers 997 stores, 303 more than a year earlier. Before the full results, Shoprite’s trading update said Sixty60 accounted for more than a third of the group’s overall sales growth, according to Bizcommunity.
The stores are also still growing. Shoprite opened a net 262 stores in the year, taking the number of corporate-owned and operated stores in its Supermarkets RSA business to 2,839, and plans another 254 in the 2027 financial year. Over five years the group has spent R34.8 billion on capital expenditure.
Years of groundwork behind the platform
Shoprite introduced SAP as its core system of record in 2017, according to SAP News Center Africa’s interview with the group’s chief executive. The same piece says that system gives the group a single source of sales and customer data, which supported the Xtra Savings loyalty programme and, later, Sixty60 in 2019. An earlier SAP News Center Africa article adds that Shoprite began using SAP’s human resources and finance software in the late 1990s and completed its SAP Retail rollout at all stores and distribution centres in 2018. Chief executive Pieter Engelbrecht said rivals can replicate Sixty60, but it will take “time and money”.
The group is now moving its financial and human resources systems to SAP S/4HANA over three years, and plans capital spending of R7.7 billion in the coming year, though the article does not say how much of that goes to SAP.
Shortt has led earlier upgrades too. CIO South Africa reports that he and his team led the replacement of Shoprite’s point-of-sale system across 29,191 till points, with about 2,450 South African stores integrated and the bulk of the South African rollout completed in about five months.
More on Shoprite and the wider sector is in the retail and consumer and technology and telecoms sections, and on the Shoprite Group tag page.
