SAP CAR Success story of a leading US Retailer
A leading US-based retailer, operating over 1600 stores in the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico, was experiencing challenges driven by the rapid increase of their omnichannel business. This prompted the need for a more robust and scalable solution to alleviate these business challenges while enabling future capabilities to support their digital growth objectives.
Challenges
As an organization that recently embarked on a digital transformation journey to support its rapidly growing omnichannel business, our client needed an effective solution that would provide an efficient sales audit and reconciliation process across all sales channels. Their existing solution on ECC was able to automate the reconciliation for only 60% of the sales transactions and for the remaining 40% of the transactions, the reconciliation was being done manually. The IT team had to look at the data and reconcile manually before handing it over to the business team.
Our client was also facing issues with inventory visibility and needed to address inventory latency issues that were resulting in fulfillment errors. They had a 4-hour delay in updating their current inventory status which led to fulfillment issues and hampered their ability to optimize order fulfillment.
Solution
Partnering with SAP and leveraging our combined functional and technical expertise in retail, we executed a series of workshops with key stakeholders to assess their business issues. Taking inputs from the workshop, we built a business case to implement SAP Customer Activity Repository (SAP CAR) to address these known issues and align to their long-term digital objectives. A value-based solution roadmap was developed before the implementation for the client to recognize benefits in a multi-phased approach and reduce business continuity risks.
Client
Pet Retailer
Solution
- SAP CAR POS Data Transfer and Audit
- Inventory Visibility
- Applexus Add-on solutions to CAR – Store Reconciliation and Payment Reconciliation
At a glance
The client was looking for an implementation partner for SAP CAR to replace their legacy home-grown system and alleviate sales reconciliation and inventory visibility challenges – in the SAP Cloud. Applexus partnered with the client to ensure a successful implementation that delivered business value. Our Payment reconciliation add-on enabled faster reconciliation for 11 payment gateway processor files by automating the reconciliation for 98% of sales transactions while the store reconciliation add-on provided a high-level view of transactions by store and the ability to drill down to specific transactions along with in-built KPIs for the IT team and sales auditors. Our client was also able to get real-time delta inventory snapshots every 5 minutes in their order management system.
We leveraged our pre-built Industry Focus Solution for SAP CAR along with our proprietary RunningStart Methodology to accelerate and ensure a successful implementation that delivered business value quickly. In addition to implementing the standard CAR solution, we also integrated the online transactions directly into SAP CAR since the SAP Sales and Distribution module was not being used. We also deployed two Applexus CAR add-on solutions: Payment Reconciliation and Store Reconciliation.
The Payment Reconciliation add-on automates the reconciliation between 11 payment gateway processor files and sales data from all channels and all tender types stored in SAP CAR. It provides a side-by-side comparison of sales transactions and payment processor data that accelerates the automated reconciliation of 98% of the sales transactions which was earlier 60% using their current solution. Additionally, our Payment Reconciliation accelerator is embedded within SAP CAR as a plug & play solution, unlike other 3rd party applications that need to be integrated with CAR. This is especially important considering that payment information is highly confidential and access to it by 3rd party applications need to be limited.
The Store Reconciliation add-on solution allows the business to reconcile the transactions by the type of media, such as sales, returns, coupons, gift cards, etc., while providing a comprehensive yet simple user interface. It provides a high-level view of sales transactions by store with the ability to drill-down to specific transactions, along with built-in KPIs for the IT team and sales auditors. Highly customizable and consolidated reports of error messages can be generated along with notifications on some of the important errors. This enables sales auditors to effectively prioritize their work and the plan for the day.
Continuing to leverage the benefits of the SAP CAR innovation platform, we have already started work on subsequent phases to roll out real-time inventory snapshots to their new order management system. This will optimize order fulfillment and prevent missing orders and delays throughout the fulfillment process. Real-time delta inventory is being sent every 5 minutes to the upgraded order management system compared to the 4 hours it takes currently which will help reduce lost sales resulting in significant cost savings.
Results
- Integrating inventory visibility with their updated distributed order management system enables our client to send real-time delta inventory every 5 minutes which improves inventory management and reduces lost sales resulting in significant cost savings.
- The Payment Reconciliation add-on solution from Applexus enabled faster reconciliation for 8 tender types by automating the reconciliation for 98% of sales transactions compared to the earlier 60%.
- The client’s legacy home-grown sales audit system was replaced with SAP CAR POS Data Transfer and Audit (POSDTA) and Inventory Visibility and fully integrated into the business system landscape.
- An omnichannel foundation was laid in the SAP Cloud that the client can now leverage to continue to grow and innovate.
- The payment reconciliation add-on also enabled the client to do daily and ad hoc reconciliation using a user-intuitive report.
- The Store Reconciliation add-on helped the client reconcile sales transactions by media (tender, sales type, material type, order channels) type while also providing a convenient front end to CAR to support an effective user experience.