The client
Trofi Pack is a Dutch packaging supplier with around 50 employees. They supply packaging materials to other businesses.
The problem
Orders came in by phone and email. Each order meant: pick up, write down, check whether the product code was right, call back if anything was missing, enter the order in the system and send a confirmation.
An average of 12 minutes per order. With dozens of orders per day, that adds up fast.
Typos in product codes regularly led to wrong shipments. A wrong item goes out the door, comes back and has to be reshipped. Every mistake costs more time than the original order.
Customers could not see their own order history or the status of an open order. Their questions ended up with the order desk, so the same people processing orders also answered the status questions.
The result: the order desk spent 60 percent of its time on data entry, and the other 40 percent on fixing mistakes and answering questions that could have been avoided.
Our approach
We started by shadowing the order desk for two days, to see where people got stuck and which workarounds they had invented themselves.
That gave us a short list of problems the software had to solve.
The solution: a custom B2B order portal. Customers log in with their own account, see their own assortment with the matching price list and place orders directly in the system. Right after that they get an order confirmation with the expected delivery date, and they can see the status of an open order at any moment.
We connected the portal to the existing ERP with a simple API. The ERP stayed in place and no historic data had to move: orders from the portal land directly in the ERP.
We host the portal in our EU cloud, so Trofi Pack didn’t have to set up or run any IT infrastructure.
We built it in six weeks, in two-week sprints. Each sprint delivered two or three features that order-desk staff tested straight away, and their feedback went directly into the next sprint. No acceptance phase was needed at the end: every sprint was already signed off.
The result
Order processing time: from an average of 12 minutes to under 5 minutes per order. The gain: no more check steps, call-back rounds or manual confirmations.
Typos in product codes: zero. Customers pick from their own assortment, so there is nothing to mistype.
Customers look up their order status themselves. That noticeably cuts the number of calls.
The order desk now spends its time on exceptions and customer contact instead of typing and fixing mistakes.
We still run the maintenance: every month we ship small improvements based on what staff and customers run into in daily use.
The tech
Hosted in a Hetzner data centre in Germany, under EU law.
Connected to the client’s ERP via a well-documented REST API, which we extend when needed.
Live within 3 months after the first demo.