Asda, the UK's third-largest supermarket, spent £1.22B untangling its IT systems from former owner Walmart, a four-year project that ran well past its original £800M estimate. Project Future replaced shared Walmart systems with Asda's own SAP S/4HANA setup in Microsoft's Azure cloud, separating more than 2,500 legacy systems, though repeated delays and integration problems hit product availability and added friction to its website. Executive chairman Allan Leighton said the fallout set back Asda's financial turnaround by six months and called the IT problems ‘totally self-inflicted,' blaming poor integration, insufficient testing, and a lack of capacity planning, with the effects expected to linger into the second quarter of 2026.
