Orderflow: order operations, fully automated
Orderflow is a fast-growing direct-to-consumer brand shipping thousands of orders a month across three sales channels. By the time they came to us, two full-time staff were spending most of their day copying order details between their store, their fulfilment system and a spreadsheet that nobody fully trusted.
The bottleneck
Every order touched four tools before it shipped. A human read the order, re-keyed the address into the warehouse system, checked stock in a separate dashboard, then updated a master spreadsheet so finance could reconcile later. It worked — until volume doubled.
At peak, mistakes crept in: a transposed address here, a missed line item there. Each error meant a re-ship, a refund or an angry email. The team was firefighting instead of growing.
"We weren't short on demand. We were short on hours — and every new order made it worse."
What we built
We mapped the full order journey, then replaced the manual steps with a single automated pipeline:
- Order capture: new orders from all three channels flow into one normalised queue automatically.
- AI validation: an AI step checks addresses, flags suspicious orders and resolves the messy free-text fields a rules engine would choke on.
- Warehouse sync: validated orders push straight into the fulfilment system — no re-keying.
- Live reconciliation: finance gets a single source of truth that updates itself, with every step logged.
We didn't automate the happy path and hope. The biggest win came from the AI step that handles the 8% of orders that used to need a human — the exact cases off-the-shelf tools give up on.
The results
Within three weeks of going live, the two staff who'd been buried in order entry were redeployed to customer experience and supplier relationships. Manual errors dropped to zero because no human was re-typing anything. Finance stopped chasing the spreadsheet.
Most importantly, Orderflow's next growth spike didn't require a single new operations hire — the pipeline simply absorbed it.
Where they're headed next
With order ops handled, we're now automating their returns flow and supplier restock alerts — turning one working automation into a system that keeps compounding.
