Client Snapshot
Our client is a fast-growing baby and kids' gear brand based in Australia. As their product range expanded across multiple suppliers and warehouse locations, their operations team found themselves stuck in a cycle of manual stock checks and spreadsheet juggling. What used to work at a smaller scale was now holding the business back.
The Challenge
Growth is a good problem to have, until it breaks the systems you built to manage a smaller business. That is exactly what happened here.
The purchasing team was making reorder decisions based on manual stock reviews and spreadsheets. As the product catalog grew into the hundreds, this approach could not keep up.
The result was a business paying a real cost for outdated processes:
Products going out of stock because purchasing decisions came too late Hours spent manually analyzing inventory across hundreds of SKUs No clear visibility into stock already in transit between warehouses Constant back and forth with suppliers just to confirm basic details Purchasing decisions based on gut feel and spreadsheets instead of real inventory data Supplier invoices checked by hand, with pricing errors slipping through
None of this was sustainable. The business needed a way to plan inventory that could scale as fast as the brand itself.
The Solution
Instead of adding more people or more spreadsheets, we built a single automated system that could think ahead of the business, not just react to it.
We used n8n as the backbone to connect inventory data, sales history, supplier information, and purchasing decisions into one continuous workflow. Rather than the team manually pulling numbers together every time a purchasing decision was needed, the system now does that work automatically and surfaces what actually matters: what to reorder, how much, and when.
The result is a business that catches stock problems before they become stockouts, and a team that spends its time making decisions instead of gathering data to make them.
How It Worked
Real-time inventory visibility The system continuously pulls inventory and sales data directly from Shopify, giving the team a live view of available stock, stock already committed to orders, and stock on the way in. No more waiting on a manual count to know where things stand.
Smart reorder recommendations Using current stock levels alongside 90 days of sales history, the system generates AI-powered reorder suggestions for the week ahead and the two weeks after that. The purchasing team gets clear recommendations instead of having to estimate from scratch.
Faster purchase planning Instead of manually reviewing hundreds of products to figure out what needs restocking, the system automatically flags what requires replenishment, removes duplicate entries, and prepares clean, ready to review purchase plans.
No more double ordering Warehouse transfer data is kept in sync with purchase planning, so the team can see what stock is already moving between locations. This alone cut down on unnecessary orders for products that were already on their way.
Supplier details on hand, always Vendor information now lives alongside purchase planning data, so the team is not hunting for supplier details every time a purchasing decision needs to be made.
Catching pricing errors automatically When a supplier invoice comes in, the system extracts the details, matches products by SKU, and compares supplier pricing against what is already on record in Shopify. If something does not line up, it flags the discrepancy and drafts an email to the supplier for confirmation, before a pricing error costs the business money.
The Results
|
Before |
After |
|
Manual, spreadsheet-based purchasing decisions |
Automated, data-driven purchasing decisions |
|
Frequent stockouts |
Stockouts significantly reduced |
|
Reactive, limited inventory visibility |
Real-time, proactive inventory visibility |
|
Manual invoice and pricing checks |
Automatic pricing discrepancy detection |
|
Ops team buried in manual procurement work |
Ops team focused on strategic decisions, not data gathering |
The Bigger Picture
Every growing D2B brand eventually hits the same wall: the manual processes that worked when the business was smaller start working against you as it scales. The brands that break through are not the ones that hire their way out of it. They are the ones that build systems that grow with them.
That is exactly what we helped this brand do. At Propero, we work with brands to build intelligent automation that removes the manual bottlenecks holding growth back, from inventory and procurement to customer retention. If your team is still running on spreadsheets and gut feel, let's talk about what a smarter system could look like for you. Book a call with us to get started.