How Bucanna Labs automated order processing without losing human control.

Bucanna Labs is an American B2B wholesaler that does more than 200 orders per month. The business has strong demand. The problem was what happened after the sale.

• Every paid order moved through four systems: CRM, accounting software, shipping software and a central spreadsheet. None of them fully understood what the others were doing.
• The team manually created an invoice, then entered the same order again as a purchase order, then added it to the central tracker.
• Shipping labels were assembled separately.
• If a supplier was delayed, someone had to notice and follow up manually.
• Existing integrations handled the easy parts. They could move information from one place to another. They could not reliably determine which supplier to use, which inventory rules applied, or when a human needed to make a decision.
• As order volume increased, administrative work increased with it. This started leading to costly errors and delays for customers.

1. Map the complete workflow with leadership. Pretrain began by mapping the complete workflow with Bucanna's leadership team, from the initial sales conversation to the delivered package. Together, we identified every system, handoff, decision, and dependency. This made the real bottleneck visible: the four workflows were waiting on one another, and the entire process moved at the speed of its slowest manual step. If a key person was out for lunch, the entire back office stalled.
2. Review the work with the people doing it. We then reviewed the work with the people performing it every day: operations, fulfilment, and finance. Through live calls and Loom recordings, we identified the repeated typing, uncertain decisions, and recurring exceptions that the existing integrations missed.
3. One pipeline live at a time. Instead of launching everything at once, we brought one sales pipeline live at a time. Each automation was controlled by a switch, so Bucanna could decide when to activate the next pipeline. Launch was always done with a manual approval step. This already helped things move a lot quicker, while still leaving the Bucanna team in control. Once they were confident in the system, the approval step was taken out to have things run fully automatically.

• Sending the invoice A person sends the invoice to the customer.
• Inventory A person approves whether existing inventory should be used.
• Shipping label A person purchases the shipping label.
• Suppliers A person contacts suppliers about delays.

• The only manual steps left now are approvals and handling rare edge cases that the bot flags.
• The total number of invoices did not change. The difference was who had to type them.
• More orders no longer require more administrative chaos.

The bot seems to be working on my end with the POs and everything pretty well. The only time there are any, I wouldn't even call them mistakes, discrepancies, it's just because our inventory trackers are not accurate. As long as we keep those accurate, then everything else is running really smooth.Operations, Bucanna Labs