Resolving a late gap before national launch

Context and responsibility

A wider programme was replacing operational and processing software to support omnichannel working. Its new-product ambition targeted approximately £50m in additional annual sales; this was a programme target, not an outcome attributable to my intervention.

I represented reporting, commissions and validations as a senior stakeholder because my platform supplied data to all three teams. I worked with the software team on sending product SKU codes from the new system to the electronic point of sale system (EPOS), so orders could be identified by store, product and employee. I agreed the requirements with the readiness team and signed off the original scope as part of the wider acceptance team.

The pilot exposed an omission

During pilot, the required attribution was not available, and I supported reporting manually. The gap was reported to the project team as missing from scope. The permanent correction would not be ready for national rollout.

Without reliable attribution, the business could not recognise sales correctly by store and employee or support commission calculations. There was a practical risk that stores would be reluctant to promote products for which their sales could not be credited.

A tested solution within my remit

I discussed the problem with SAP developers. Together we experimented with adapting existing logic to match EPOS transactions against order data from the connections system. Dummy transactions in the SAP test environment confirmed that store, product and employee could all be identified correctly.

The design used two routes: pass through the identifiers when the EPOS data was complete; otherwise run an extended match against the order data. Once the source defect was corrected, transactions could use the standard route without further changes to the matching logic.

The SAP data fed Retail Insights, so this reporting change was my responsibility. I used my BAU budget to move quickly. The project retained responsibility for correcting the original source-system defect.

Outcome

The solution was used for national rollout. I could report to the Transformation Director that the reporting and attribution blocker had been removed, supporting the decision to proceed. Qualifying transactions flowed through the platform’s two-hourly update cycle. Following the intervention, the director invited me onto the steering committee to help assess further operational scope gaps.