Two people spent every morning retyping emailed orders

A customer portal, so clients could enter their own orders instead of emailing them.

Their customers were never going to use a portal. Orders came from dispatchers at twelve different firms, each with their own systems and no reason to learn another one. The real cost was not the emails — it was that every order was typed twice, once into the ERP and once into the warehouse system, and the two drifted apart by the end of most weeks.

• —A parser that reads the order out of the email, whatever shape it arrives in
• —A single write path into the ERP, with the warehouse system following from it
• —An exceptions queue for anything the parser is not confident about, reviewed by a person

The customer portal. It would have cost roughly four times as much and, on their own estimate, about two of their twelve customers would have used it.

• TypeScript
• Postgres
• A queue
• Their existing ERP's API

Two weeks diagnosing, six weeks building