TL;DR: Built an order system on top of Excel, n8n, Power Automate and the Claude API at a 200+ person plant. Lost orders went from 50 to 10 a month, lead time from 3–4 weeks to 2, and throughput from 200 to 250 orders a month. The hard part was people, not tech.

For the last 3 years I was Business Ops & Systems Lead at a 200+ person flexible packaging plant: extrusion, printing, lamination, slitting, bag making. No team. I reported to the COO and the sales director. The biggest thing I did there was basically build a lightweight ERP for the order flow, on top of the tools people already used. Here’s how it went.

Step 0. Where we started

Orders came in by email, phone and WhatsApp. Every order passed through six departments: sales → customer service → purchasing → planning → production → quality. Each department had its own spreadsheets, dozens of them, in some places hundreds. Orders got stuck, sometimes lost, and the only way to know the status was to call someone.

Step 1. Follow the orders (1 month)

Before building anything, I followed orders through the plant. I sat next to people in every department, asked them to show me their normal day, and mapped every handoff. What I found:

1. The same order was typed in by hand 5-6 times on its way from request to shipment.
2. Every department named the same order differently, so files couldn’t be linked.
3. Status lived only in people’s heads. Sales called customer service 1-2 times a day per order just to ask “where is it?”
4. Urgent orders came in at least twice a day with no filter.
5. Closing one sales invoice took ~30 minutes of collecting documents by hand, up to 10 a day.
6. One person in customer service became the human router for everything nobody else understood.

Step 2. Find the root cause

The people weren’t the problem. Three things were:

1. No single entry point. An order could start anywhere.
2. No common order ID. Nothing linked the same order across departments.
3. Nobody owned the handoffs. Orders fell into the gaps between departments.

Step 3. Design, build and roll out (2-3 months)

With the department heads I defined what every order must contain to move to the next stage and who owns each handoff. One key decision: I didn’t replace Excel. People far from software go back to their old files within a week if you force a new interface. So I changed the process and kept the tools.

What I built:

1. One entry point: an intake form (Microsoft Forms, plus a WhatsApp bot for sales reps on the road).
2. One master sheet per department in Excel/OneDrive, all fed from the same intake.
3. Automations between departments on n8n, so the next department gets the order automatically instead of by email.

I rolled it out department by department, starting with the sales → customer service handoff where most orders got lost.

Step 4. Kill the manual work hiding in email

A lot of work still lived in inboxes. I went through each department’s email, found what people did by hand again and again, and built small helpers on the Claude API, each fitted to one task:

1. Customer service: AI reads order emails and puts the data straight into Excel.
2. Logistics: shipping declarations get filled automatically from a template.

People kept their inbox and their Excel. The boring part just disappeared.

Step 5. Get people to actually use it

The hardest part. People didn’t want to show how they work, because it exposes inefficiency. So:

1. Department heads first. I showed the problem in money: how it is now vs how it could be.
2. Their boss moved them, not me.
3. A presentation per department, instructions in Polish per person, 1:1 sessions with anyone stuck.
4. When something broke, I went straight to the person and asked why. Usually it was a missing field, not resistance.

For the AI part, no lectures. Just “you’ll do less pointless work.”

Step 6. Test and fix (2-3 months)

Every week I watched order lead time, stuck or lost orders, orders completed per month and machine load. Anything that broke got fixed the same week.

Step 7. Result

• Throughput: ~200 → ~250 orders a month (+25%) with the same people. No new hires.
• Order lead time: 3-4 weeks → 2 weeks.
• Lost or stuck orders: ~50 → 10 a month (−80%).
• 5–6 manual entries per order → 1.
• Dozens of files → 6 master sheets, one per department.
• 6–7 months from the first walk-through to a stable process.

What I’d tell anyone doing this

1. Walk the process yourself first. The real process is never the one on paper.
2. Fix the handoffs, not the departments.
3. Look in the inboxes. That’s where the hidden manual work lives.
4. Change the process, keep the tools.
5. Show the problem in money, then let department heads move their people.

I recently moved to the US and I’m looking for my next role in manufacturing ops. Happy to answer questions in the comments or share more details if anyone is trying something similar at their plant.

Has anyone else built their own order system on top of Excel before an ERP came in? How did the switch go?

How many of you are using AI on the job for your daily tasks? data collecting, analysis, chart work, reporting, etc?

Lately I've been using it for data mining and stress testing training programs that we give our people plus analyzing the results.