The entire idea of a "Dedicated Business Owner" was nonsense to begin with. If my business is plastics, how can I be dedicated if I'm constantly being pulled to help with fulfillment? Or backup cash? And I only work 40 hours, at most. That means other people are also in plastics, messing it up. Even when I have a light workload and finish early, I don't get to spend the rest of my time zoning or making my area look nice; I get sent off to another area that I do not own.
It was never going to work, at least not as it was written on paper. Outside of the whole "ownership" thing, giving someone 5 things to do, but only enough time to do 2-3 of them means that they're going to prioritize 2-3 things. More often than not, those things were pushing and backstocking. That means pricing didn't get done, zoning didn't get done, revisions and salesplanners didn't get done, audits didn't get done. If it was a big truck or a double, then pulls likely didn't get done either. No ETL or SD is going to let vehicles of push build up until they had to call the DSD or OD to cancel a truck, so vehicles were always the priority over everything else. At least until OFOs were in the quadruple digits and the DSD sent an angry email, then the focus was pulls until there were too many vehicles and pallets of freight in the backroom to even try to start a truck, then it was back to vehicles again.
Maybe there were stores that had the hours and staffing to actually implement Modernization by-the-book and manage to succeed, but they were clearly few and far between. Even when Modernization was just a rumor, everyone who knew better would tell you that specialty teams are the way to go. You want pricing to get done? Have a pricing team. Planograms? Have a presentation team. Audits? An instocks team. It's not rocket science that giving people just 1 thing to focus on means that they can, yes, focus on that one thing and actually finish it. Even outside of retail, it's beyond obvious. There's a reason why we have doctors, lawyers, laborers, etc... that specialize in one area of their field rather than everyone trying to do everything.