Coinstar runs SAP ERP. The hard part was never the migration.

Moving the SAP environment took 70 days. Feeding it takes every day. A coin-kiosk network pours settlement and cash-collection data into SAP GUI screens that have no clean API, and that is exactly the layer generic RPA keeps stalling on.

Matthew Diakonov, Written with AI

Published June 20, 20267 min read

Direct answer · verified June 20, 2026

Yes, Coinstar uses SAP ERP. Coinstar runs SAP in a hosted model with SAP Basis and Functional support, and migrated its entire SAP environment to a new host in 70 days after a prior hosted contract expired. That detail comes straight from the company’s published account of the move.

Source: Rackspace Technology — Coinstar case study. The five-month infrastructure program moved roughly 1,000 virtual machines; the SAP cutover itself was the 70-day piece.

The number that actually matters is not 70

A clean SAP migration is a one-time event. The recurring cost for an operator like Coinstar is the back office that runs on top of SAP every single day. Picture the shape of the business: tens of thousands of unattended kiosks in grocery and retail lobbies, each one counting coins, dispensing vouchers or cards, and generating a stream of cash-collection, settlement, and transaction records.

Those records do not post themselves. Someone, or something, has to turn an armored-carrier pickup into a goods movement, a daily kiosk settlement into a journal entry, a bank deposit into a cleared item, and an exception into a flagged record a human can chase. In a large SAP shop that work lives in transaction codes typed into SAP GUI: journal entries, account clearing, and reconciliation screens that were never designed to be called from an API.

70 days

“We had 70 days to migrate our SAP environment. Other providers told us no.”

Coinstar CTO, Rackspace Technology case study

So the question for a finance or ops leader at a kiosk-network company is not whether SAP is hosted well. It is who keys the daily flood of settlement data into SAP GUI, how many people that takes, and what breaks when SAP changes a screen.

Where the data has to land

Every kiosk-network reconciliation follows roughly the same path. The first and last steps have APIs. The middle step, the one inside SAP GUI, usually does not.

Kiosk settlement to SAP posting

Kiosk + carrier data

Daily settlement files, cash-collection counts, and armored-pickup manifests land as CSV, EDI, or a vendor portal export.

Match and validate

Expected collection vs counted vs bank deposit. Variances over a threshold get held for review instead of posted blind.

Post in SAP GUI

Journal entries, goods movements, and account clearing keyed into transaction screens. No public API, so this is the manual or bot step.

Reconcile and flag

Cleared items confirmed, exceptions written to a queue with the source record so a human resolves the real problem, not a typo.

Why the usual SAP bot stalls, and what changes

Most teams reach for traditional RPA to handle that middle step. It demos well and then quietly degrades, because of how it sees the screen. The fix is not a better recording. It is reading SAP GUI the way assistive technology already does.

Targeting a field in SAP GUI

The bot was recorded clicking row 4, column 2 of the posting screen, or matching a saved control ID. SAP ships a support pack, a transaction variant moves a field one row, and the path no longer points at the right box.

Breaks on support packs and variant changes
Fails silently or posts to the wrong field
Per-screen maintenance is the real cost
Vision/pixel matchers add latency and still drift

The detail that makes this safe in finance

Reading the screen reliably is half the job. The other half is knowing what to do when SAP says no. A reconciliation bot that retries every rejection is dangerous: it hammers a real validation error, or worse, re-posts a duplicate.

Mediar classifies the error before it reacts. A posting date in a closed period or an unknown company code is workflow logic. It is never retried. The record goes to a human queue with the exact value that failed. A connection reset, a 503, or an SAP application server that bounced is infrastructure, retried with 30s, 60s, 120s backoff capped at 600 seconds. The result is that a bad journal entry stops immediately, while a flaky network self-recovers.

You can see the approach in the open: the engine that drives SAP GUI through the accessibility tree is published as the Terminator SDK at github.com/mediar-ai/terminator. That is the uncopyable part. It is not a screen recorder with a nicer UI; it reads the same interface SAP already exposes to assistive technology, and it treats SAP’s own validation as a stop signal rather than something to brute-force.

What this tends to move

Numbers below are from Mediar deployments on legacy desktop systems, not from Coinstar specifically. They are the shape of result a kiosk-network reconciliation workload tends to produce.

$0Per minute of runtime, no per-seat license

0%Cost cut an F&B chain reported moving off UiPath

$0K/yrSaved on one carrier's claims-style data entry

0 selectorsRecorded coordinates to maintain per SAP screen

If it renders on Windows and exposes an accessibility tree, Mediar can read it. SAP GUI is the start, not the limit.

The same approach covers the rest of the legacy stack

SAP GUI

Journal entries, goods movements, account clearing.

SAP Business One

Mid-market SAP desktop client, same accessibility path.

Oracle EBS

E-Business Suite forms with no clean API surface.

Mainframe terminals

Green-screen 3270 sessions for legacy back office.

Jack Henry / Fiserv / FIS

Banking core desktop apps for cash and settlement.

Epic / Cerner

EHR desktop clients where intake data is keyed.

Have a SAP GUI reconciliation that keeps breaking?

Show us one workflow on a call. We will tell you in the session whether the accessibility-tree approach handles it and what a pilot looks like.

Frequently asked questions

Does Coinstar use SAP ERP?

Yes. Coinstar runs SAP ERP in a hosted model with SAP Basis and Functional support. Per the Rackspace Technology case study, Coinstar moved its entire SAP environment to a new host in 70 days after a prior hosted contract expired, consolidating three vendor relationships into one.

What is the hardest part of SAP for a coin-kiosk operator?

Not the migration. It is the daily back office: thousands of kiosks each produce cash-collection, settlement, and transaction records that have to land in SAP as journal entries, goods movements, and reconciliations. Most of that posting work happens in SAP GUI screens that have no clean API, so it gets keyed by hand or by a brittle bot.

Why do RPA bots break on SAP GUI?

Classic RPA tools target SAP GUI by coordinates or recorded selectors. When SAP applies a support pack, a transaction variant changes, or a field shifts one row down, the recorded path no longer matches and the bot fails silently or posts to the wrong field. Maintenance, not licensing, is where most SAP RPA programs stall.

How does Mediar read SAP GUI differently?

Mediar drives SAP GUI through the Windows UI Automation accessibility tree, the same interface a screen reader uses, via the open-source Terminator SDK at github.com/mediar-ai/terminator. It targets a field by its accessible name and role rather than a pixel position, so a posting routine survives a screen that shifted. There are no image matchers and no recorded coordinate paths to maintain.

What happens when a posting is rejected by SAP?

Mediar classifies the error before deciding what to do. A posting date in a closed period or an unknown company code is workflow logic, never retried, and routed to a human queue with the exact record. A connection reset or an application server bounce is infrastructure, retried with 30s, 60s, 120s backoff capped at 600s. A retry storm against a real validation error never happens.

What does Mediar cost compared to traditional SAP RPA?

Mediar bills $0.75 per minute of runtime with no per-seat licensing, plus a $10,000 turn-key program fee that converts to prepaid credits with a bonus. One F&B chain that moved from UiPath to Mediar reported a 70% cost cut to its board. The savings are usually in maintenance and headcount, not just license fees.

Does this work if our SAP is hosted or on-prem?

Yes. Mediar runs on the Windows desktop or VDI session where SAP GUI already runs, so it does not care whether the SAP application server lives at Rackspace, in your own datacenter, or in a cloud VM. It reads the GUI the operator sees. Mediar is SOC 2 Type II certified and supports on-prem or cloud deployment.

More on automating SAP without brittle selectors.