Food distribution company — Distribution
From a group chat to an order flow you can trace
Orders arrived in a group chat and were tracked in spreadsheets. We turned the path from message to delivery into a single flow.
- Year
- 2025
- Industry
- Distribution
01Challenge
Around two hundred orders a day came in by phone and messaging app. Each was rewritten at least three times: once in the office, once in the inventory sheet, once in accounting. When a customer asked where their order was, nobody could answer with certainty.
02Analysis
- 01The real path of an orderTracing thirty real orders showed an average four-hour gap between first entry and warehouse confirmation — not from lack of staff, but because nobody knew whose turn it was.
- 02Where stock discrepancies came fromAlmost every mismatch came from orders recorded in the warehouse but not in accounting, or the reverse. It was not a stock-keeping problem; it was the absence of a single source.
- 03The hidden cost of chasingAbout a third of the sales team’s time went to answering "where is my order?" — work that appeared in nobody’s job description.
03Solution architecture
01 — Solution architecture
Intake
- Order form
- Telegram bot
- Phone entry
02 — Solution architecture
Core
- Order service
- Validation rules
- Single order status
03 — Solution architecture
Connections
- Warehouse
- Accounting
- Delivery routing
04 — Solution architecture
Feedback
- Customer notification
- Ops dashboard
- Delay alerts
04Results
- Entry to warehouse confirmation4 hoursunder 30 minutes
- Manual rewrites per order31
- "Where is my order?"a call to salesautomatic notificationon the standard order path
- Stock discrepanciesfound at month endflagged daily
Toolsn8nPostgreSQLTelegram Bot APIAccounting APIMetabase
The biggest change was not that things got faster. It was that we finally know where every order is.
Operations manager — Food distribution company
Next step
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