Digitizing warehouse management at the scale of a global industrial group is an especially complex challenge when trades, flows and volumes vary widely from one site to another. At the Tech For Industry Show, Nicolas Bel, EWM Solution Architect and Team Lead, SAP Digital Warehousing Group (Saint-Gobain) and Maxime Bollard, Head of Customer Success (HRC Software) looked back at the rollout of a mobile solution for SAP EWM across the group's warehouses.

Saint-Gobain, a sustainable construction group organized into several business units (Placo, Isover, Glass Industry, among others), is running a large-scale convergence program toward a single target ERP. This program highlighted a specific problem: aging warehouse management solutions, split between classic SAP WM modules the IT department no longer wanted to maintain, and internal WMS whose data model was no longer compatible with the future ERP.

With a roadmap covering more than 50 sites to transform over three years (both production and distribution warehouses, with very different flows and complexity levels), Saint-Gobain decided to pull the warehouse management (EWM) topic out of its overall ERP transformation program, in order to gain autonomy and speed of execution.

Beyond the purely technological question, the project team identified a central risk: adoption by operators. Some sites, previously running SAP WM without particular issues, would have to switch to EWM without having asked for it. The stated goal was therefore to offer an easy-to-use tool, minimizing the need for training sessions as much as possible.

Saint-Gobain compared three approaches: SAP's native solution (deemed too limited in terms of responsive screens), in-house custom development (around 12 months of development, with no guarantee of meeting every need since it would be built incrementally), and a vendor solution. Following an RFI that included HRC Software and other mobility vendors, as well as the internal team, the choice fell on a vendor solution, deployed in a pre-production environment in just 4 months.

Standard SAP EWM screens for a goods receipt, for example, were described as unclear for operators: which key to press, what to scan or not, all sources of hesitation.

The solution deployed with HRC Software relies on an interface organized into cockpits (Neptune technology), where each type of information (handling units, deliveries, batches, expiry dates) always appears in the same place, with the same progress color coding (white, blue, green). The speakers noted that after just two or three training sessions, operators master the tool and gain productivity compared with standard SAP screens.

Unlike the standard SAP solution, which requires selecting a field before scanning, the HRC Software solution relies on a single scannable field per screen and an autofocus feature that automatically identifies the scanned information (including Data Matrix codes compliant with the GS1 standard). This significantly reduces the number of clicks and the risk of error.

The case study details several areas of differentiation compared with the standard SAP solution: better ergonomics, technical integration based on SAP's standard APIs and modules (via the Neptune platform), installation managed directly by HRC Software (versus an implementation seen as more complex with native SAP tools such as ITS Mobile or SAP Console), functional coverage extending beyond the warehouse (maintenance, purchasing), and better handling of micro network disconnections, an important issue in large warehouses containing insulating materials that create dead zones.

Saint-Gobain highlights the co-innovation approach with HRC Software: more than a hundred new features have been requested by the group and integrated into the vendor's standard product, also benefiting the solution's other customers.

HRC Software reports a rollout across around seven Saint-Gobain sites to date, for about 500 users, with nearly 80,000 actions performed daily on the application — a direct indicator of real adoption by the teams.

The success of the rollout sparked interest from other Saint-Gobain entities in other modules of the HRC Software solution, beyond warehouse management alone (maintenance, purchasing).

At a Glass Industry site in Romania, the solution helped reduce inventory discrepancies, previously above €150,000 per inventory count with the old solution, to around €10,000 after implementing the mobile tool.

The rollout is set to accelerate over the 2026-2028 period, with around twenty new sites planned for the following year and another ten by the end of the current year, on a total roadmap of around fifty sites, potentially more. The EWM standard combined with the HRC Software mobile solution has been validated as the group standard for any entity needing a WMS.

This case study illustrates a central challenge of supply chain 4.0: the success of a digital transformation in the warehouse doesn't depend solely on the technology chosen, but above all on adoption by field operators. By focusing on ergonomics, reducing the number of clicks and scans, and a co-innovation approach with its vendor partner, Saint-Gobain was able to accelerate a multi-site rollout while reducing the need for training.

Watch the full case study, along with the other Tech For Industry Show replays, on our dedicated page.