Ulta's Project SOAR ERP overhaul gave 1,400 stores real-time inventory, finishing in 2025
Ulta Beauty completed Project SOAR, replacing legacy SAP across seven DCs and 1,400+ stores for real-time inventory — its biggest IT overhaul ever.
What was changed
Ulta Beauty has completed Project SOAR, which Fortune describes as the most significant IT-led overhaul in the company's 35-year history. Ulta committed up to $180 million over three years when it announced the ERP program in December 2021, most of it planned for fiscal 2022 and 2023 (CIO Dive). Chief technology and transformation officer Mike Maresca says the team 'had to really rethink and modernize our core systems' — the old SAP setup could not keep up with omnichannel demand: 'We were not up to the minute like we are now. It was very hard to meet the guests' needs.'
SOAR replaced the older SAP legacy systems with ones that manage inventory and supply-chain data in real time, rolled out in three phases: corporate functions first, then the seven distribution centers, and in 2024 the more than 1,400 stores. Maresca says the foundation equips Ulta as it expands to Mexico and the Middle East later in 2025 — a year CEO Kecia Steelman, promoted from COO in January 2025 after Ulta lost beauty market share in 2024, has called a transition year, with an online marketplace and faster brand launches planned.
On top of the new core, Maresca is pushing AI: internal use of Google's Gemini Code Assist and a Microsoft Copilot pilot has IT 'seeing about 25% to 30% improvement in terms of productivity' (his figure); an internal AI Center of Excellence pairs engineers with business functions; and agentic AI is being explored for store tech-support tickets and distribution-center order moves. With Adobe, Ulta wants to turn its 44.6 million loyalty members into individually personalized marketing, moving past today's four broad segments.
Why it worked
Productivity and capability figures are the CTO's own statements to Fortune; the piece reports no audited financial results of SOAR itself.
It documents the full arc of a large ERP replacement — announcement, vendor stack, phased rollout, completion — which most such programs never disclose.
It shows how modern core systems become the platform for the next agenda: agentic AI and 1:1 personalization both presuppose the real-time data SOAR produced.
The phase order (corporate, then DCs, then stores) is a reusable template for retail system cutovers.
What can be applied
Sequence matters in ERP overhauls: corporate first, then distribution centers, then stores lets each phase stabilize before the next; and modern core systems are the entry ticket for the AI agenda.
Aftermath
As of April 2025 SOAR was complete and the team had turned to AI adoption at scale. Ulta planned to enter Mexico and the Middle East in 2025 on the real-time inventory foundation and to launch an online marketplace after losing market share in 2024. Loyalty segmentation was still coarse — four buckets — with finer personalization as a stated goal ('I don't think it'll be 44 million segments, but that is the high-level goal,' Maresca said).