Business process automation for work that relies on someone remembering

1. 01
   We mapped the manual circuit first

   Who receives the order, which three sheets it gets copied into, which field is retyped in each one and where it stalls. The bottleneck was a single person: if they were out, orders piled up in their inbox until they came back.

2. 02
   We picked what stays with a person

   Data entry, validation and the warehouse notice were automated. Releasing an order for a client with an overdue balance and approving an off-list price stayed with the back office. Automating that was possible too, and it was a mistake: those are commercial judgement calls, so the flow stops them and leaves them in a tray instead of deciding on its own.

3. 03
   The flow hangs off a single form

   The rep enters the order once. The flow validates the tax ID, looks the client up in the management system, checks that every product code exists and has stock, and only then writes: it creates the order, generates the delivery note, notifies the warehouse and adds the deal to the rep summary. One form triggers the four entries that used to be made by hand.

4. 04
   When something fails, you can see where

   If the management system or the tax registry does not answer, the flow retries three times with a growing wait between attempts. If there is still no answer, the order sits in a queue with the exact state it stopped at, and when the service comes back it resumes from that step and not from the start. Each order carries its own number, so a retry never creates two identical orders. Every attempt goes to the log with what was sent and what the other side replied, and the back office gets the alert with the order and the reason. Nothing fails quietly: if something did not get loaded, somebody knows the same day.

The same mechanics work for supplier onboarding, reconciling payments against a bank statement or loading purchase invoices: the trigger and the destination change, the way it is put together does not.