Q&A: Jake Allmond, Managed Services Director at PMC
PMC combines strategic consulting, engineering, our own platform Graphene and Managed Services to simplify complexity, connect data and deliver scalable commerce transformation for retailers, including Primark, Ann Summers, Bodycare, Crew Clothing and World Duty Free.
Can you tell us a bit about your background?
As Managed Services Director at PMC, I help the leading retailers we work with, like WHSmith and Superdry, maximise value and ROI from their tech investments.
Having worked in service delivery, customer success and operational leadership roles for over 15-years, I use this experience to help brands drive continuous improvement and unlock performance and growth through innovation.
What does your company do? / What is your USP?
PMC combines strategic consulting, engineering, our own platform Graphene and Managed Services to simplify complexity, connect data and deliver scalable commerce transformation for retailers, including Primark, Ann Summers, Bodycare, Crew Clothing and World Duty Free.
As well as our 25 year heritage in helping retailers digitally transform their operations and capabilities, we blend our deep sector and platform expertise, data and AI capabilities and retail experience to deliver measurable outcomes that help retailers future-proof their technology stacks and drive long-term performance.
How are retailers using your systems to gain competitive advantage and what does best practice look like? Can you share a case study with us?
A good example of the hand-in-hand approach we take working alongside retailers is our recent digital transformation project with B&M, where we deployed a modernised Point of Sale (POS) solution.
Operating one of the UK’s largest value retail estates, B&M wanted to modernise its store operations, replacing its legacy POS solution with new hardware and updated software that would deliver greater agility and future-proof its store systems and enhance customer experience.
Acting as its trusted transformation partner, we worked closely with B&M to deliver a zero-touch, automation-led POS rollout across 790+ stores, which combined automated hardware builds, which significantly reduced deployment timescales and operational impact, as well as centralised software deployment and real-time monitoring.
This created a consistent, repeatable and scalable roadmap, allowing the rollout to progress at speed and scale, supported by our UK and India-based development and delivery teams.
What challenges and opportunities do you see in UK retail for 2026? / How will you address these challenges and turn them into successes?
Against an unstable economic backdrop, softer consumer demand, growing shopper caution and rising costs, such as NICs and business rate reforms, retailers’ competing priorities are being placed under more pressure. This means many face a trade-off between the need to invest in innovation and other competing priorities, such as cost-saving measures and margin protection.
And that trade-off is only going to become harder as we look ahead to the rest of 2026, as the retail environment and trading conditions become more complex. Our latest data in the Race To Unified Commerce Report underscores just this, with ROI and economic uncertainty the top challenges facing retailers when it comes to digital transformation.
Embracing a back-to-basics approach, by adopting simplified, product-led delivery models and a modular, composable strategy will enable retailers to drive results from their tech stacks, without tying themselves in knots or adding complexity to their existing operating systems.
Complexity isn’t just confined to systems themselves – sometimes internal resources, skills gaps and navigating organisational cultures can also hinder progress and limit ROI. PMC’s hybrid model, which flexes to retailers’ needs, whether they need full execution, complete Managed Services or a blend of strategy, delivery and execution alongside their internal teams, can also help drive performance effectively and economically.
What is on the horizon for you as a company?
This year, PMC will be celebrating 25 years of delivering digital transformation excellence to the retail industry, which will represent a key milestone for the business and reflect how we have adapted our offering and operations over the last quarter of a century to meet evolving sector needs. This will involve customer and team celebrations at our Innovation & Delivery Centre (IDC) in Alembic City in Vadodara, India.
The IDC launched in late 2025 and is home to over 400 PMC technologists. The facility was opened to leverage cross-border collaboration to deliver high impact solutions for commerce brands and has already accelerated our delivery of unified commerce, cloud, engineering and Managed Services across large transformation programmes for retail and commerce clients globally.
More immediately, we’re already helping retailers and brands with their Peak Trading preparedness – they don’t call it ‘Christmas in July’ for nothing! We’re helping leading retailers stress-test their systems, ensuring they have the right structures, visibility and support in place to cope with the inevitable demand spikes from Black Friday to Boxing Day and beyond.
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To find out how PMC can help your retail operation, visit them online here or connect with them here.
