The Challenge
A Dublin retail chain operating 4 locations had grown rapidly over three years — but their back-office operations hadn't kept pace. Every day, orders arrived via their online store, by phone, and through a wholesale portal. Each channel fed into a different system, and reconciling them was entirely manual.
Two members of staff spent the equivalent of two full working days per week printing order confirmations, manually re-entering details into their stock management system, and then copying data again into their accounting software. Errors were common — wrong quantities, duplicated orders, missed stock updates — and each mistake created downstream problems that took additional time to fix.
The trigger: After a particularly bad week in which 14 incorrect orders were dispatched and two customers complained publicly, the operations manager booked a free productivity audit with Data Sensum.
The Audit Findings
During the free internal productivity audit, we mapped the end-to-end order fulfilment workflow across all three channels. The audit identified five opportunities for improvement, with order processing automation ranked as the highest-impact intervention:
- Orders from all three sources were being re-keyed manually — zero automation between systems
- No single source of truth for stock levels across locations
- Confirmation emails were being written and sent manually, one at a time
- Reporting on daily sales required pulling from three separate exports
- Staff had no visibility of fulfilment status without checking multiple systems
The Solution
We designed and built an automated order processing pipeline that connected all three order sources to a central workflow engine. When a new order arrives — regardless of channel — the system automatically:
- Captures and standardises the order data into a single format
- Updates stock levels in real time across all four locations
- Creates the corresponding entry in the accounting system
- Sends a branded confirmation email to the customer
- Flags any low-stock situations to the relevant store manager
The entire pipeline runs without human intervention. Staff now only need to review a single daily summary dashboard — and only need to act when an exception is flagged.
Implementation time: The full solution was designed, built, tested, and deployed within 3 weeks — including staff training and a parallel-run period to validate accuracy before switching off the manual process.
The Results
Within the first month of go-live, the business reclaimed over 20 hours of staff time per week — time that has since been redeployed into customer service and business development. Order errors dropped by 99%, and customer satisfaction scores improved measurably.
The annual labour saving, calculated at the blended hourly rate of the staff involved, came to approximately €24,000. The full project cost was recovered within the first 10 weeks.
What the Client Said
"We knew we had a problem but we didn't realise how big it was until we did the audit. The whole process was surprisingly painless and the results were immediate. The two team members who used to spend their Mondays processing orders are now doing things that actually grow the business."
— Operations Manager, Dublin Retail Chain