SHL Medical: Switching from firefighting to foresight by continuously monitoring how business processes are executed
Real-time process performance insight
To accelerate continuous improvement across warehouse operations, SHL Medical AG adopted the SAP Signavio Value Accelerators package for the SAP Extended Warehouse Management application. This helped the company resolve a lack of transparency into how its warehouse processes were actually being executed, allowing it to transform warehouse operations.
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| Life sciences | Zug, Switzerland | ~6,000 employees |
faster issue resolution cycle, down from ~6 months to ~1 month.
of correction recommendations informed by data.
visibility into open tasks, bottlenecks, and deviations.
Global Process Excellence Lead, SHL Medical AG
Closing gaps across the entire warehouse value chain
SHL Medical AG is a global leader in self-injection solutions. Committed to enabling patients’ independence, the company designs, develops, and manufactures advanced drug delivery solutions that deliver life-changing medicines to patients worldwide.
As an early adopter of advanced business technology, SHL Medical invested in modern ERP infrastructure over a decade ago, using it as a foundation to expand its manufacturing footprint significantly. The company opened new sites across Europe and the United States, with each new site bringing new processes, new teams, and new operational complexity. At the same time, SHL Medical operated a heterogeneous warehouse landscape, with some sites using an internally developed warehouse management system and others running the SAP Extended Warehouse Management (SAP EWM) application. These differing system environments created process gaps and operational complexity across the network.
Problems were surfacing across inbound, intralogistics, and outbound processes. Material availability was inconsistent, production continuity was at risk, inventory was difficult to stabilize, and on-time delivery performance was suffering. Ultimately, customers felt the impact.
The dominant narrative inside the organization was that the systems were to blame without looking at the processes themselves. What was missing was process visibility. Without transparency into how warehouse processes were being executed, it was impossible to distinguish genuine system limitations from process deviations and user behavior gaps.
One telling example involved warehouse tasks across multiple sites that were routinely left open and never confirmed. They accumulated quietly in the system, making operational dashboards unreliable and masking the true scale of execution problems. The issue remained hidden—until process data exposed it.
Global Process Excellence Lead, SHL Medical AG
Making insights actionable from the top floor to the shop floor
As part of its broader supply chain transformation journey, SHL Medical participated in an early pilot for the SAP Signavio Value Accelerators package for SAP EWM. This early involvement gave the team at SHL Medical direct input into shaping how the solution addressed real operational needs. By introducing a funnel-based analytical approach, benchmarking across warehouses would provide visibility into individual warehouse efficiency and the ability to isolate specific execution issues, such as cancellations, exceptions, and delivery blocks.
Working with product teams from SAP, SHL Medical extended the data model, enriched dashboards, and integrated additional business context, including sales organization data, plant-level information, storage bin details, and mobile device usage tracking.
The company adopted the SAP Signavio Process Intelligence solution. The solution offers ready-to-run process analysis for real-time monitoring and correction recommendations while also allowing custom process analysis for deeper process mining and root-cause analysis. This provides SHL Medical with day-to-day operational transparency while enabling structured improvement initiatives.
At the same time, broader KPI dashboards in the SAP Analytics Cloud solution and third-party tools serve the needs of upper management. This deliberate separation resolved a common point of confusion around why teams needed process indicators in SAP Signavio when they already had KPIs elsewhere. Showing leadership how a process performance indicator connects upward to a corporate goal was the key to getting management attention and top-down prioritization of improvement actions.
Andreea Sorina Dahl, global process excellence lead at SHL Medical, comments, “Process transparency allows us to prove what is really happening. That helps drive accountability and enables us to focus on the right improvements.”
Global Process Excellence Lead, SHL Medical AG
Championing a new operating culture with improved speed and data quality
Before SHL Medical adopted SAP Signavio, identifying a warehouse problem, tracing its root cause, and completing corrective action would take as much as six months. With process transparency, correction recommendations, and structured improvement governance now in place, that cycle has shrunk to around one month. Teams spend less time investigating and more time fixing.
For example, open warehouse tasks are now tackled systematically using the correction recommendations in SAP Signavio Process Intelligence. Whenever the root cause is identified as user behavior not aligning with process requirements, SHL conducts retraining programs that are designed around specific deviations rather than generic instructions.
Perhaps the most significant result can be seen in SHL Medical moving the conversation inside its operations from “the system is broken” to “let’s look at what the process data shows.” Process owners are now genuinely accountable for execution and improvement, not just for design. And process improvement is no longer a project run by IT: it is recognized as a business initiative, owned by business stakeholders, and driven by operational reality.
Global Process Excellence Lead, SHL Medical AG
Calculating the entire value chain of its transformation projects
SHL Medical is already using the SAP Signavio Process Transformation Manager solution to manage process improvement initiatives from end to end. This starts with a process insight being flagged in SAP Signavio Process Intelligence through to structured action planning, prioritization, and execution tracking. Integration with SAP LeanIX solutions adds an enterprise architecture dimension so that when a process improvement requires a system change, data from SAP LeanIX helps the company assess the cost, effort, stakeholders, and resources involved.
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Driving Change Management with SAP Signavio and SAP LeanIX Solutions (SAP Customer Video)