From Five Orders a Day to Twenty-Five
How custom back-office systems turned a five-order bottleneck into a twenty-five-order-a-day operation.
Order processing capacity per person
Orders processed per person per day, up from 5
Manual data entry errors after automation
A growing business with a bottleneck
I was recruited to work full-time in a timber company. The business was growing and orders were picking up, but the back office was still running on manual processes that hadn't changed in years.
Every order meant printing emails, re-keying data, and juggling paperwork between departments. The more orders came in, the more cracks started to show. The business had the demand, but the systems behind the scenes weren't built for that kind of volume.
Triple entry, triple the risk
Like most companies in the trade, everything was manual. An order would come in, someone would print it out, then type it into Sage as a sales order. Then type it again as a purchase order to buy the wood. Then type it again as another purchase order to get the wood sawn to particular sizes.
The same information, entered into the same system, three separate times. Every time it was typed, there was a chance of an error. Wrong dimensions, wrong quantities, wrong pricing.
The business had the demand. Now it needed the systems to handle it.
Rebuilding the back office
The company was ready to invest in doing things properly. Before I wrote a single line of code, I spent two weeks documenting every process, every handoff, and every workaround that people had invented because the systems didn't do what they needed.
Then I built a complete custom system that automated the order pipeline end to end. Orders could be imported directly into Sage, with pricing calculated automatically. That meant no more printing emails, no more typing the same order three times, and no more guesswork on pricing.
The computers did the work that people had been doing by hand, and typing errors in order entry dropped to zero.
The result
One person could now comfortably put through 25 orders in a day. Not because people were working harder, but because the repetitive work was automated and the team could focus on the things that actually needed a human brain.
That extra capacity changed everything. The business could now handle volume at scale, so the investment in marketing and growth actually paid off. The systems removed the bottleneck, and the company was able to grow significantly as a result.
Dave technically revolutionised our company. The systems he built pulled us years ahead of everyone else in the industry.David Haddrell, iWood
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