Do away with repetitive tasks, connect the steps – from invoice capture to complete order processing without manual intervention.
Between any two systems there is almost always a person. Someone reads an order out of a mailbox and types it into the ERP. Someone copies figures from a portal into a spreadsheet because there is no interface. This work appears on no cost centre, yet it costs hours every day – and it is error-prone precisely because it is dull. Two side effects weigh heavier than the lost time: the process only runs as long as the one person who knows it is there. And nobody can say how long a case actually takes, because none of it is logged. As volume grows, the effort grows with it – linearly, with every additional order.
First we measure what the process costs today: how often it runs, how long one pass takes, where it stalls. Without those numbers, any automation is a bet. Then we cut the process into steps and decide, step by step, whether it should be automated, simplified or dropped – some of it isn't worth it, and we say so. We build in n8n, extended with our own components where the standard nodes fall short. Every step gets a defined failure case: what happens when a field is missing, a system doesn't answer, a value is implausible. Unclear cases go to a person rather than being guessed. Before go-live the automation runs in parallel with the existing route until the results match. After that we hand over documentation and monitoring – you should be able to see whether the automation is working without asking us.
Transport orders arrive through a platform and are accepted and scheduled automatically according to your rules. If an order doesn't fit the pattern – an unusual condition, an ambiguous time slot – a plain-language query goes to dispatch by e-mail or WhatsApp instead of the automation guessing. One such route is running in production today.
Invoices reach you as PDFs in a shared mailbox. The route collects them, reads header and line data, matches them to the supplier and the purchase order and files them in the ERP for approval. The clerk still decides – they just no longer retype anything.
Master data, prices, stock levels: where two systems hold the same information, reconciliation today usually runs via an export file and someone who imports it. As a scheduled route it happens overnight, logged, with an alert on discrepancy – and nobody has to remember it.
Every route has a defined failure case. A case that doesn't complete cleanly is not silently discarded but halted and reported – by e-mail or into the system you already work in. The previous manual route remains available: automation replaces the handling, not the ability to do it. Monitoring shows you which runs succeeded and which were left standing.
As a rule, yes. n8n workflows are built graphically and can be read without programming knowledge; once you understand the logic, you can change thresholds, recipients or conditions yourself. We hand the routes over documented and explain them to the people who will work with them. Whether you take over operations yourself or leave them with us is then a question of capacity, not of technology.