We eliminated 4–6 daily hours of manual Excel transfers at a Central European logistics company: REST/OData interfaces from SAP ERP and a Next.js admin UI for daily operations. The back-office team reclaimed 3 FTE for other work.
Background
The client is a regional logistics company with 80–100 staff and a 50+ person back-office team. The central system is SAP S/4HANA, surrounded by a WMS (in-house), a third-party freight-tracking platform, and an Excel-based KPI reporting setup.
The back-office spent 4–6 hours per day on data transfers between systems: Excel exports from SAP, manual checks, importing into the WMS, generating reports. Errors lurked at every transfer, and in the past year two large shipment ordering mistakes (around HUF 8M total value) traced back to manual Excel operations.
Challenge
Management set three goals: 1) eliminate manual Excel transfers, 2) reduce back-office hours by 30%, 3) produce an audit trail for every data movement so the upcoming ISO 9001 audit wouldn't be firefighting.
The difficulty wasn't the technology: SAP REST/OData interfaces and a Next.js admin are standard. The challenge was switching over the daily work of a 50+ person back-office without disruption while the ISO audit was coming up at year-end. No room for a two-month UAT.
Approach
We planned a phased rollout: not one switch, but three waves: first the highest-error-rate process (shipment notification → freight carrier), then invoice data transfer, finally the KPI reporting layer. Each wave ran 4–5 weeks with a dedicated UAT group.
In the discovery phase (3 weeks) we mapped every manual transfer: 23 distinct processes, of which 8 daily, 11 weekly, 4 monthly. We prioritized by error rate × person-hours affected — the top 5 covered 78% of the manual workload.
Solution
Two main building blocks. (1) SAP-side ABAP development and OData services: 5 new OData entities (Order, Shipment, Invoice, Customer, KPI), each exposed through the Gateway. ABAP customizing produces an audit-trail table for every write operation. (2) Next.js admin UI with TypeScript and Tailwind: 6 primary views (Daily ops, Shipments, Invoices, KPI, Audit, Settings), role-based access control (NextAuth + Microsoft Entra ID SSO).
Integration runs over REST/OData; the admin UI calls SAP via serverless API routes. Reads are cached 5–15 minutes (data freshness is acceptable, SAP can't be overloaded). Writes are direct pass-through with audit logging.
Tech decisions
On the SAP side we used ABAP for the public OData services — the least invasive option, and the existing customizing team can carry it forward. SAP CPI (Cloud Platform Integration) was an option, but the licensing was an issue and the client wanted to stay on-prem.
Frontend Next.js + TypeScript instead of SAP UI5 / Fiori, because: 1) Next.js is the company-wide stack, 2) Fiori development cycle is slower and hands-on expertise is stronger on our Next.js side, 3) integrating an external identity provider (Microsoft Entra) is simpler in Next.js. PostgreSQL backs the audit log (we don't write audit records into the SAP DB).
Bumps
One of the longest hurdles: the SAP customizing team's original estimate for Gateway config was 1 week — it actually took 3.5 weeks because there was an organization-specific role mismatch in Gateway service registration that wasn't documented.
The second: SSO integration with Microsoft Entra ID. IT had a two-week turnaround on every config change. The workaround: we asked for a dedicated test tenant where we configured everything ourselves, and only switched to production at the end.
The third: part of the back-office resisted the change. The 'we've always done it this way' attitude caused the first wave UAT to slip by 2 weeks. The fix: a dedicated change champion in the team, brought in early during wireframing.
Results
Six months after go-live the numbers: of the 23 identified manual transfers, 18 are gone, 3 partially automated, 2 still manual (low priority). Team-level back-office hour savings are 22 hours per day (around 3 FTE), redirected to higher-value work (vendor management, KPI analysis).
The number of incorrect shipment orders fell 84% vs the 6-month historical average (from 12–15 per month to 2–3). The ISO 9001 audit passed; the auditor explicitly cited the audit-trail system. KPI dashboards are real-time; the management team follows them daily (the monthly Excel report is gone).
Stack
We weren't dazzled by the tech: we wanted concrete solutions to concrete processes. Phased rollout was key — had we tried a big bang, the shop floor would probably have stopped.
COO — Logistics company
The quote represents typical client feedback; it is not a verbatim citation.
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Read detailsCase studies are based on real projects, anonymized at our clients' request. Numbers are approximations; specific business data remains confidential.