I was the shift supervisor, one step below the facility's assistant manager, and the third-highest person in the warehouse I worked in. I saved my (now-former) employer $150+ mil in destroyed product, and probably saved their entire company from going under because of it.
They were a satellite communications company. We had a classification system for different types of goods. The two classes that matter in this little story are Class 1 (brand new product) and Class 4 (non-repairable product that is going to be sent for scrap, and the company would get a chunk of money back from the recycling).
Once per quarter, a third-party company would come in and pick up all Class 4 junk and scrap it. How they found where the goods were at in the warehouse were with hand-held computers that listed a specific serial number in a specific storage location.
This particular time, however, someone in the company had entered a 1 instead of a 4 for the class of product to take, so the scrappers were loading up all the good product into their trucks. I noticed this and tried to get ahold of somebody at the company, but it was late on a Friday afternoon and pretty much everybody was gone (along with my facility's manager and assistant manager).
I made the decision to put the entire process on hold because of it, and because we in the warehouse weren't even provided with the info on what was good, bad, etc, and because I couldn't update the order to send them out (no access to the Orders system), the scrappers left with no product leaving the warehouse.
Come Monday, I have the entire company screaming bloody murder at me. It turns out that it was a very tight quarter, and they were going to miss their quarterly bonus because the money from the scrapped goods wouldn't be received in time to count for the quarter.
I spent the bulk of that week in "coaching" and "training" sessions, being chewed out over making decisions I "wasn't authorized to make," and during the entire time, nobody seemed to care that the goods being taken originally were the good product ($150+ mil), and not the junk (maybe $2-3 mil in value).
On Thursday, after spending some 20 hours in lectures and similar BS, all while having my job threatened every step of the way, someone in the company finally acknowledged that what I did was probably the right thing.
Instead of receiving any appreciation, or even a tiny little apology for how they treated me, I had to sign a form agreeing to never make a decision that was "above my level" again, and that I would contact management before making a decision if it ever happened again, with no actual way to contact management provided if they weren't in the office.
Needless to say, I left not long after.