Supply chain shock exposes legacy limits
Container shipping through the Suez Canal has dropped by about 75% since the Red Sea crisis began, forcing many carriers to reroute around the Cape of Good Hope. These longer routes add 10 or more days to transit times on key lanes and disruption has persisted into 2026, so retailers face extended lead times and higher uncertainty on when containers will arrive.
In many organizations, the constraints come from older ERP, WMS and TMS platforms whose configuration and reporting cannot be adapted quickly enough to match shifting sailing schedules and re-routings. Operators often revert to spreadsheets and ad-hoc tracking, which fragments information across teams and slows down decisions on replenishment and allocation.
Scandiweb’s OperaLayer approach
Scandiweb, a Riga‑headquartered e‑commerce and enterprise systems agency, positions OperaLayer as an operational layer that sits on top of, or between, existing transaction systems rather than replacing them. The framework consolidates data from ERP, WMS and TMS into configurable tools tailored to specific workflows, with an emphasis on getting a working minimum viable product into use within 72 hours.
The company has already applied OperaLayer in sectors including grocery, pharma and general retail, citing deployments with clients such as Sportland and ESELO. These projects focus on issues such as incomplete shipment visibility, fragmented data on expiry‑sensitive products and duplication of planner effort across multiple spreadsheets.
Stock and Shipment Control Cockpit
The Stock and Shipment Control Cockpit was implemented for a furniture, home and textile supplier whose legacy ERP did not clearly distinguish between delayed, rerouted, blocked or duplicated shipments. In practice, this meant sales teams were quoting arrival dates that no longer reflected actual vessel movements, and planners were generating duplicate replenishment orders against purchase orders that were stalled in transit.
The cockpit brings together open purchase orders, warehouse stock levels, shipment events, sales allocations and planner notes into a single operational view, with stock tagged as available, allocated, at risk or blocked for review. According to Antons Sapriko, Founder and Executive Chairman at scandiweb, the team was initially managing over 200 open purchase orders with no reliable status, and within three days planners were able to see each shipment and react to new exceptions on the same day they appeared. He said that kind of response would not typically be possible through a standard legacy system change request.
Exception Allocation App for grocery and pharma
The Exception Allocation App targets a distributor with grocery, pharmaceutical and B2B supply lines whose planning still relied on standard lead‑time tables while short‑life and critical products were tracked in multiple spreadsheets. The new tool combines ERP order data, distribution centre stock, shipment delay signals, expiry dates and forecast information into a ranked exception queue that human planners review and approve rather than managing line items across different files.
In one use case described by Scandiweb, expiry‑sensitive lines were previously spread over four spreadsheets, and consolidating them into a single exception queue cut duplicate data entry by an estimated 60–70% in the first week. Both the cockpit and the exception allocation app were delivered as working MVPs in 72 hours, illustrating how OperaLayer is applied as a stop‑gap around legacy platforms rather than a full system overhaul.
Security, AI use and data boundaries
Scandiweb delivers OperaLayer within a defined framework that covers information security, cloud security and quality management, which is important for customers in regulated sectors like pharmaceuticals. The company specifies that any customer data exposed to external AI services is agreed case‑by‑case with each client, and for the disruption scenarios described, no external AI transfer was required.
The firm reports more than 500 in‑house specialists, over 23 years in operation, client relationships that typically run beyond five years, a client satisfaction rate above 95%, and retailer growth commonly in the 20–30% annual range, including 11 consecutive years of approximately 30% year‑on‑year expansion. These figures indicate that OperaLayer is being added into an existing enterprise services portfolio rather than introduced as a standalone product start‑up.
