Worked examples · Illustrative
One order desk for a brand selling on Shopify, Amazon and Instagram.
A brand that grew faster than its back office. Orders arrive from four places, stock lives in a spreadsheet, and the owner reconciles it all after closing.
What was going wrong
Every evening the owner opens four tabs and one spreadsheet. Amazon orders are copied by hand into the courier’s portal. An Instagram sale is a WhatsApp message and a UPI screenshot. When the same kurta sells on two channels within an hour, one customer gets a cancellation and a bad review. Returns come back to the shop with no record of which order they belong to, so they sit in a corner until someone has time.
None of this is a technology problem the owner can name. It is three hours a night, a growing pile of returns, and a nagging sense that the numbers in the spreadsheet are not the numbers in the godown.
What we would build
One order desk. Every channel feeds into a single screen the team already knows how to use: new orders on the left, packed in the middle, dispatched on the right. Stock is counted once, in one place, and every channel sees the same number, so a kurta that sells on Amazon disappears from Instagram in the same minute.
Returns get a barcode when the order ships, so when a parcel comes back, one scan tells the team whose it was, why it came back, and whether it goes back on the shelf. Customers get a WhatsApp message at each step without anyone typing it. The owner gets one page every morning: what sold, what shipped, what came back, what is running low.
What we would agree up front
- Orders untouched by hand. The share of orders that go from placed to dispatched without anyone retyping anything. Counted from day one; the target is agreed once we have seen the first month.
- Oversold items. Orders accepted for stock that was already gone. Counted before we start, so the improvement is real.
- Owner hours. Evenings spent reconciling, written down for two weeks before and two weeks after.
What the owner would be left with
A system that runs in the brand’s own accounts, staff who were trained on it while we were still in the room, a one-page guide for the next hire, and a written note at the end saying what worked, what did not, and what to do next. If the brand adds a fifth channel next year, it plugs into the same desk.
This is business automation: one desk for systems that do not talk to each other, built the way how we work describes.