The provider's business was fulfilment for other people's shops: merchants sold across 4 ecommerce platforms, and every one of those orders had to reach the warehouse's ERP before anything could be picked, packed or shipped. There was no connection between the two sides. Warehouse staff worked through each platform's order screen in turn, copying customer names, addresses and line items into the ERP field by field.

Shipping was just as manual. Once an order sat in the ERP, someone chose a courier, keyed the consignment details into the courier's own portal and booked the collection. Between the copying and the booking, the routine consumed more than 6 hours of staff time every day, and the workload grew with every new merchant the provider signed.

Hand-copying at that volume is never clean. Transposed digits and mistyped postcodes turned into parcels delivered to the wrong address, which meant refunds, re-shipments and awkward conversations with the merchants whose customers were let down. Orders also queued behind the manual process, taking 4 hours on average just to be processed.

We built a centralised integration layer that sits between the sales channels and the warehouse. It pulls orders from all 4 platforms through their APIs as they arrive, so nothing depends on anyone watching an order screen. Each platform describes an order in its own format, so the layer normalises every one into a single unified schema before anything downstream touches it.

From there, orders are pushed into the ERP automatically, in the exact shape the warehouse already works with. No ERP replacement, no retraining: the system staff knew simply started filling itself. Validation happens on the way through, so the address that reaches the pick list is the address the customer actually typed.

Courier selection and booking moved onto business rules. The layer weighs each order's details, picks the appropriate courier service and books the shipment without a human in the loop, while staff keep full visibility of what has been booked and step in only on exceptions. The result is a booking process that runs at the speed orders arrive rather than the speed a person can type.