Transforming Sales Audit process for a leading retailer with SAP CAR | Case Study
The client is a leading American regional grocer with over 200 supermarkets in the Southeastern United States. They offer their customers a wide variety of food products including grocery, meat and dairy products, produce, frozen foods etc. Along with the supermarkets, they also own and run shopping centers, gas stations and a milk processing plant. They were looking for a partner to assist them in transforming their 20-year-old custom sales audit process.
Business Challenges
The client had a 20-year-old custom sales audit process with only department-level financial postings. The process needed to be modernized due to changing business models, a lack of support, and an absence of detailed audited sales data for running analyses and deriving actionable insights.
For the transformation, they wanted to leverage SAP Customer Activity Repository with standard Sales Audit to lay the groundwork for new business models and future use cases with CAR. Their current sales reports were backward focused due to the legacy sales audit process. The client wanted new, real-time forward-looking analytics provided by CAR to derive actionable insights that could support their future growth. In addition, the client also needed to update their custom code for consumer credit card reconciliation for instore transactions that no longer had any support, as well as provide additional reconciliation feeds for curbside/online business models.
Partnering with Applexus
Applexus implemented SAP CAR Sales Audit connecting it with their current Point of Sale System, their E-commerce system and their SAP S/4HANA environment. The scope of the project included a new trickle feed of POS data, the SAP sales audit module and two Applexus add-on solutions – Payment Reconciliation and Store Reconciliation. Applexus leveraged our proprietary pre-built Industry Focus Solution for CAR along with our unique RunningStart methodology to ensure a successful implementation with rapid time-to-value.
Payment Reconciliation
Applexus has created an add-on solution embedded in CAR to automate the reconciliation between multiple payment processor data and the CAR omni-channel sales data. Applexus Payment Reconciliation provides a side-by-side comparison of -sale transactions and payment processor data that accelerates reconciliation with increased accuracy and efficiency. For our client, the Payment Reconciliation add-on solution automated the reconciliation between processor files and sales data from all channels stored in SAP CAR and was implemented with three data feeds - credit cards for in-store transactions, credit cards for online and third-party check clearing.
Client
Regional Grocer
Solution
SAP CAR Sales Audit solution
Applexus add-on solutions
- Payment Reconciliation
- Store Reconciliation
At a glance
The client needed a transformation strategy to modernize their 20-year-old custom sales audit process that had only department-level financial postings. Applexus partnered with the client to implement SAP CAR Sales Audit connecting it with their current POS System, E-commerce system and SAP S/4HANA environment along with two Applexus add-on solutions – Payment Reconciliation and Store Reconciliation.
Store Reconciliation
Applexus Store Reconciliation add-on solution is a comprehensive and convenient user interface and has functionality that allows retailers to reconcile at a higher level than the POS Workbench more easily. This allowed the client to reconcile the transactions by the type of media such as sales, returns, coupons, gift cards etc. It also provided a comprehensive and convenient front end to SAP CAR to support a simplified and more effective user experience.
The CAR implementation also found accuracy issues in their previous POS interfaces to custom sales audit financial posting that were affecting both sales and discounts. Following the implementation, the accuracy issues have been resolved.
Benefits Delivered
- Implemented standard SAP CAR with ongoing support from SAP & Applexus, to replace their out-of-support customized solution with fewer people required to support it
- The new trickle feed of point-of-sale data enabled the client to get intra-day sales from across their stores for the first time.
- Provided a multi-channel view of sales including their curbside pick-up business.
- Providing more complex, forward-looking sales analytics with new reporting capabilities that enable insights-driven decision making for pricing and promotions
- Sales auditors gained efficiencies from current system processes with SAP CAR and minor enhancements put in by Applexus