SAP Warehouse Operator

A native mobile app that puts the power of SAP's Extended Warehouse Management into the phone in your pocket.

Role: Lead Designer - discovery, user research, requirements engineering, prototyping, and final UI

Focus: Enterprise UX/UI · Mobile · Barcode, QR & text scanning · AR

Overview

SAP's Extended Warehouse Management (EWM) runs the back end of warehouses for an estimated 70–80% of the world's 500 largest companies. It's powerful, endlessly customizable, and handles nearly everything a modern warehouse needs, but it lives behind dated, browser-based screens and bulky handheld "laser-gun" scanners.

I led the design of The Warehouse Operator, a native mobile app that brings EWM's full capability to a phone, leveraging its camera, processing power, and familiar, intuitive interface to do what the old hardware never could.

The goal was simple to state and hard to earn: give warehouse operators a genuine reason to leave a decade-old system behind.

Challenge

These are the original screens from over 20 years ago that where still used till that point.

The central tension was that EWM already worked. It had never needed to change because it did everything customers asked of it and much more. So the real problem wasn't rebuilding EWM. It was answering a sharper question: what could we offer that was compelling enough to make people switch away from a system and hardware they'd relied on for years?

Speaking with operators surfaced four pain points the existing setup never solved:

  • Usability — EWM is old and overlooks many now-standard usability principles

  • Accessibility — essentially non-existent

  • Hardware — the scan guns are large and unintuitive

  • Speed — entering data and scanning is slow

Beneath all of it sat the deeper challenge: understanding exactly what EWM could do, how customers actually used it day to day, and which data I could pull through existing APIs to deliver something measurably better.

Approach

I anchored the entire product to three promises for the user:

  1. Ease of use — translate EWM's dense interface into clear, obvious actions

  2. Camera-first scanning — use the phone's camera to read barcodes, QR codes, and text, replacing the laser gun entirely

  3. Context — surface only the information needed to finish the task at hand, and nothing more

Rather than design from assumptions, I went into the users' world:

  • Ran workshops with SAP's existing customers, producing an end-to-end user journey and a refreshed persona to steer every decision that followed

  • Built the information architecture and interaction diagrams, then turned them into a screen flow and a working prototype

  • Worked in tight, qualitative research cycles — guided and unguided prototype testing, click-flow analysis, A/B testing, and 1-on-1 interviews

Information Architecture

The design evolved across three research-backed versions:

  • V1: built collaboratively with the customer and Apple during a 4-day design sprint

  • V2: after early testing revealed users needed more guidance, I rebuilt around very clear CTAs and minimal distraction

  • V3: The Final Release pushed further still, with an even cleaner interface and stronger visual hierarchy

With each iteration I stripped away anything unnecessary, so operators could focus entirely on the task while keeping fast access to every function they might need. The scanning screens, the app's core differentiator, earned the most attention of all.

A summary user journey of multiple warehouse workers with pain points, actions and opportunities

Screenflow

Outcome

The Warehouse Operator shipped as a full public release on the App Store, not a concept or a pitch, but a product operators use in live warehouses. SAP has fully supported and maintained it for years since launch, validating the camera-first approach as a genuine alternative to the legacy laser-gun hardware.

The impact showed up where it mattered most, in the day-to-day work on the warehouse floor:

  • ~30% faster onboarding for new warehouse employees, thanks to the clear, guided interface that replaced EWM's dense legacy screens

  • More than 3× faster scanning in some cases, with the phone camera outperforming the old handheld scan guns

  • Long-term adoption: years of continued SAP support, proving the product earned its place against a system customers had relied on for over a decade

The project succeeded at the hardest thing it set out to do: give people a reason to leave a system that already worked.

Next

MyBMW App (coming soon)