Business Process Optimization for Retail Supply Chain

This builds on the same retail chain we’d earlier migrated to S/4HANA. Once their core system was stable on the cloud, a different problem became obvious, their order-to-delivery process across stores had too many manual approval steps slowing things down, and nobody had real visibility into where shipments were getting stuck. We ran a business process optimization exercise on their supply chain workflow, mapped out where the delays were actually happening, and rebuilt the approval flow along with custom SAP analytics dashboards to track it going forward.

Table of Content

Challenges
Our Solutions
Results
Service Used

The Challenge

The S/4HANA migration had fixed the infrastructure side, but it surfaced a separate problem that had been sitting underneath it the whole time:

  • Every stock transfer between the warehouse and stores needed manual approval at two separate stages, even for routine, low-value transfers that almost never got rejected
  • There was no single view showing where a shipment actually stood in the process, warehouse teams, store managers, and logistics coordinators were each working off their own partial picture
  • Delayed approvals meant stores sometimes ran out of fast-moving items while stock sat waiting for sign-off at the warehouse
  • Nobody could say with confidence which stage of the process was actually the bottleneck, everyone had a theory, but no one had data to back it up

They didn’t need new infrastructure this time. They needed someone to actually look at the process itself, since the system could clearly move faster than the workflow on top of it was allowing.

Our Solution

Before touching any configuration, we spent time tracing shipments end to end, pulling timestamps from the system for a sample of transfers over a few weeks to see where time was genuinely being lost, rather than going off assumptions.

That process optimization exercise turned up something the client hadn’t expected: the second approval stage, meant to be a final check, was approving almost everything without any real review. It had become a rubber stamp that added delay without adding much value.

Based on that, we:

  • Removed the redundant second approval step for transfers under a set value threshold, keeping manual sign-off only for higher-value or unusual transfers
  • Built custom SAP analytics dashboards showing real-time shipment status, so warehouse, store, and logistics teams could all work off the same picture instead of fragmented updates
  • Added cost-per-delivery reporting, which hadn’t existed before, giving the logistics team a way to actually track efficiency over time instead of relying on gut feel
  • Set up automated alerts for any transfer stuck at a stage longer than expected, so delays got flagged before turning into an actual stockout

Rolling back the approval step took some convincing internally, a couple of managers were understandably nervous about removing a control, even one that wasn’t doing much. We handled that by keeping a threshold-based exception in place, so anything genuinely high-value still went through review, and by running the old and new process in parallel for a few weeks so they could see the data before fully committing to the change.

Results

Average transfer time from warehouse to store dropped by close to 40%, mostly from eliminating the redundant approval stage. Stockouts tied to delayed transfers dropped by roughly 25% in the months following rollout, since fast-moving items no longer sat waiting on a sign-off that rarely changed anything. The logistics team also got a clear, data-backed view of delivery costs for the first time, which they’ve since used to renegotiate terms with a couple of regional transport vendors.

One thing still under review: the value threshold for requiring manual approval was set conservatively at rollout, and the team is now looking at whether it can be raised further, given how few exceptions have actually needed manual sign-off so far.

Tech stack we used

AI & automation solutions

Frontend: ReactJs

Backend: NodeJs

Mobile: Flutter

Database & infrastructure

Database: MongoDB & Redis

Cloud/Hosting: AWS

Other Tools/Integrations: Flolive