Fourteen manual steps between an order and a dispatch
Every order batch at Coastline crossed three teams and fourteen manual steps: exporting orders, checking stock, emailing suppliers, waiting for confirmations, creating invoices, matching payments, chasing exceptions, updating the CRM and assembling a weekly report.
It took two days and three people, and the weekly report was always a day out of date by the time anyone read it.
One trigger, no handoffs
We mapped the flow in week one, then rebuilt it as a single automated run on n8n with custom Python for the matching logic. Orders trigger the run, stock is checked, supplier POs draft and send, invoices are created and matched, and only genuine exceptions reach a person.
Everything is observable: each run writes a timestamped log, and the team clears exceptions from a Slack channel instead of a spreadsheet.
Two days of coordination became four minutes of compute
Measured over 90 days against the same period the previous year, from Coastline's own run logs and timesheets.
In their words
“The order desk stopped being a topic. The team clears exceptions over coffee and everything else has already run.”
What we would do next
Returns and claims run on the same shape and are the obvious next queue. Scoped at $12K to $20K, 3 weeks.
Nothing here is committed. It is the honest answer to the question the client asked at handover, and the estimate we gave for it.
Team on this project
The same people who scoped it built it. No handover to a delivery pod.
Related work
Questions about this project
The run is idempotent and checkpointed. A failure stops at the step, alerts the channel with the context, and resumes from the checkpoint once cleared — it never double-invoices.
No. We picked n8n here because Coastline wanted to own and edit the workflow themselves. Make, Zapier or plain code are all fine; the audit week picks the right one for your team.
Coastline does. It runs in their infrastructure, documented, with 30 days of support included and an optional monthly retainer after that.
From their own timesheets: the fourteen steps at their measured durations, multiplied by batch volume over 90 days, divided by three.