An ecommerce retailer generating over $10,000,000 in annual revenue found their team of 10 constantly busy and falling behind. They were losing potential opportunities for procuring discounted merchandise, money on fulfillment errors, and accounting mistakes, which stifled their growth potential. The business owners estimated these issues were costing them about 15% of their profit and hindering their ability to scale.
Our first task was to document the departmental workflow, the interactions between departments, and their systems and data sources. With this documentation, we recommended an iterative approach to process automation. We started by creating simple spreadsheets to manage their processes, hosted in the cloud for team collaboration and activity timestamping. This allowed employees to take ownership of tasks and document their efforts in procurement, fulfillment, and data management.
After implementing the spreadsheet systems, we developed a series of Microsoft Azure WebJobs to automate these processes, reducing manual steps with each iteration. We integrated with APIs and created processes that monitored emails to react in real-time to discounts from distributors for the procurement team and incoming orders for the fulfillment team. We also automated data entry between their ERP software and accounting software, and synchronized purchase data from distributors and order data from distribution channels to the ERP.
In the end, the client had a fully automated workflow, allowing them to focus on growing their business. They recovered over 12% of their profit, significantly enhancing their scalability and efficiency.
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