Shoebox / Office Shoes

Shoebox Kft. is the operator of the Office Shoes footwear store network. In 2022 the network was present in 13 Central and Eastern European countries with more than 190 stores, and it served the Hungarian, Czech, Polish, Romanian, Slovak, Croatian and Slovenian markets from its central warehouse in Nagytarcsa, Hungary. The cooperation began in February 2018 with the extension of an existing warehouse PDA application, and the successive assignments grew into a partnership lasting several years. BlackBelt worked with three mobile developers until the end of 2021 and with two afterwards, in cooperation with the client’s SAP team.

Before the developments, Shoebox handled most of the administration related to warehousing, logistics and inventory on paper. It needed applications that track changes in stock, distribution and sales, and connect directly to the SAP ERP and the warehouse management system (WMS). The solution had to work quickly, accurately and with large item volumes on PDAs of different ages from several manufacturers, without a continuous internet connection, in the stores of seven countries and in the central warehouse.

BlackBelt developed a family of native Android applications for PDAs with barcode readers, with a direct SAP connection and offline operation, so that goods can be tracked from receipt at the warehouse to receipt in the store. For the central warehouse, applications were built to support goods receipt, picking, cross-docking, store allocation and pallet loading, as well as the handling of online orders and the feeding of the sorting machine; for the stores, applications that handle goods receipt, returns and stocktaking.

With the go-live of the store goods receipt application, Shoebox’s entire logistics chain came under digital supervision: instead of the previously mostly paper-based administration, near real-time stock data became available in the central system. In 2021–2022 the applications were used in more than 100 stores in seven countries, on more than 300 devices and in the central warehouse, in several languages. Goods became traceable from receipt at the warehouse, through the pallet, to receipt in the store; work became faster and the number of errors fell.

“BlackBelt has been our software developer partner since 2018, when we started the digitalization of our warehousing and logistics processes. Together we implemented a PDA-based solution, in order to make the background processes of business operations more transparent, precise and effective.” – Csaba Szakadát, Head of the SAP Unit, Shoebox