Connected 38 systems and removed 1,900 manual hours a year
Order, inventory, fulfilment, and finance data lived in six systems that only agreed with each other because someone reconciled them by hand every night. We replaced that person with infrastructure.
- Client
- Direct-to-consumer commerce group
- Duration
- 5 weeks
- Team
- 2 engineers
- Delivered
- 2025
Measured impact
What was actually wrong
Growth across three storefronts and two marketplaces had outrun the operations team. Stock levels drifted between channels, oversells triggered refunds, and the daily reconciliation spreadsheet had become load-bearing infrastructure maintained by one person.
- Nightly manual reconciliation across six systems
- Roughly 2.1% of orders oversold due to stock drift
- Nine-hour average lead response on wholesale enquiries
- Monday reporting consuming half a day of the finance lead's week
What we built and why
We audited and timed every manual loop first, then automated in strict order of hours saved per week of engineering effort.
One event backbone instead of point-to-point
Channels publish into a single event pipeline with idempotency keys and dead-letter queues, so a marketplace outage delays a sync instead of corrupting stock counts.
Inventory as a single source of truth
A reservation model with per-channel buffers replaced the nightly spreadsheet. Oversell rate fell to 0.1%, and the remaining cases are genuine race conditions that resolve automatically.
Lead routing measured in minutes
Wholesale enquiries are enriched, scored, routed round-robin with SLA timers, and escalated when unanswered. Average response time is now four minutes.
Reports that arrive before the meeting
Scheduled jobs assemble the Monday pack and deliver it to Slack at 07:00, with the underlying figures reconciled automatically and discrepancies flagged rather than hidden.
“We were about to hire two operations people. Instead we spent five weeks on automation and the roles were never needed.”
The practices this engagement drew on.
Let us look at your architecture.
Two ways to start, both of them short. Bring the problem, not a specification — the first useful thing we do is tell you what we would build and roughly what it costs.
Book an architecture call
Fifteen minutes, no deck. We map your problem to an approach and tell you what a realistic scope and budget look like.
- A specific technical recommendation
- A budget band you can plan against
- An honest answer if we are the wrong fit
Send a written brief
Prefer to write it down? Email us the shape of the problem and we will reply with a first take, usually under 12 hours.
- Goes straight to an engineer, not a sales inbox
- We reply with an approach, not a brochure
- Attach anything: repos, docs, screenshots