Your associate is on two devices. One shows the order. The other shows the inventory. Neither talks to the other, so she’s the one reconciling them at the curb while the customer waits.
That’s not a staffing problem. It’s a systems problem, and it’s costing you more than you can see on any single report.
The Manual Workaround
Across every industry we work in, the most expensive line item on the operation isn’t headcount or software licenses. It’s the gap between systems that should be sharing data and aren’t.
In grocery, that gap lives at the curb: click-and-collect orders that the inventory system confirmed but the warehouse never had. Hospitality operators feel it at the front desk, reconciling a room and a tee time booked through two platforms that never spoke to each other. A logistics dispatcher ends up calling a driver to relay information the routing app should have sent automatically. Meanwhile, construction field crews pull schedules the office updated two days ago and never pushed out.
The systems aren’t broken. They’re just not connected. As a result, a person on your team is doing the connecting by hand, every shift, at a cost that shows up as overtime, errors, and customers who don’t come back.
What Changes When the Gap Closes
When Hy-Vee brought Shockoe in to build the Fast & Fresh app, the operational problem was exactly this: food ordering, fuel pricing, loyalty rewards, and location data all lived in separate systems. Associates managed the gaps. Customers felt them.
Shockoe built the layer that connected all of it into one experience. Deliverect handled live order routing. Sanity managed menu content dynamically by location and time of day. The loyalty program surfaced the right reward at the right moment, not in a weekly email nobody reads. Because curbside pickup was trackable in real time, from order placed to car in the lane, customers stopped calling the store.
The result: 180-plus locations running from one connected platform. Daily app opens from customers who used to call in. Associates doing their actual jobs instead of bridging what the systems couldn’t.
The 2024 RVATECH/Gala Tech Builder Award recognized the build. Still, the operational outcome is what matters: fewer manual steps, fewer errors, a customer experience that works the first time.
Same Problem, Every Industry
The Hy-Vee build is a grocery story. The architecture behind it isn’t.
For example, Foxwoods and St Andrews Links run the same connected layer between their room reservations and tee sheets: 55,000-plus tee times booked in-app, zero double-bookings from systems that used to disagree. J.B. Hunt runs it across a network of more than 20,000 drivers: real-time routing decisions made on live data instead of what the system last knew four hours ago. Across hospitality and logistics, closing the integration gap cut call volume by 30 percent.
Different industries. Different stacks. The gap between systems is the same. So is the fix.
Shockoe builds the layer that closes it, without replacing what you already run. Your TMS, your PMS, your WMS, your ordering platform: they stay. What changes is whether they share data, and whether your team is doing that work or the system is.
FAQ
Do we have to replace our current systems?
Rarely. The work is building the layer that connects what you already run, not replacing it. Your existing platforms stay in place. What changes is whether they share data in real time and whether your team still has to bridge the gap by hand.
How do we know where our integration gaps actually are?
That’s the first conversation. We do a 30-minute platform risk review: we look at your current stack, map where the data breaks down, and tell you what it would cost to close it. No proposal at the end. Just the read.
We’re not at Hy-Vee scale. Does this apply to us?
The Fast & Fresh engagement covered 180-plus locations. However, the architecture problem exists at 12. The build scope changes based on your stack and your volume. The gap between your systems doesn’t care about your size.
How long does it take to see a difference operationally?
It depends on where the gap is and how much manual work is filling it today. In most engagements, the first measurable change is a reduction in the manual steps your team takes to reconcile what two systems disagree on. That shows up in the first weeks after launch, not months.
Is this specific to retail and hospitality, or does it apply to our industry?
Shockoe has built integration layers for grocery, hospitality, logistics, and construction. Although the industries are different, the pattern is the same: systems that don’t share data, and a person carrying the gap. If that describes your operation, the conversation is worth having.
