Joanna Leung

Product Leader | Passionate in solving problems valuable to people with technology |

Order Fulfillment Workflow Automation

𝗖𝗢𝗡𝗧𝗘𝗫𝗧
Highland Feather is a Canadian duvet maker. Like most SMBs, it relies on spreadsheets, paper, and manual handoffs.

JL Consulting and ChangeConnect Inc. jointly ran a discovery workshop to map every operational process for each function at Highland Feather.

Stakeholders ranked use cases by effort (operation frequency, volume, and person-hours). Order fulfilment ranked first, so JL Consulting owned it from discovery to pilot.

𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗣𝗥𝗢𝗕𝗟𝗘𝗠
Staff key in each order manually from five sales channels three times at different stages of order intake and fulfillment.

They need to look up order-corresponding materials by hand.

The process is error-prone, and errors surface late in the process, post-production, which is costly.

𝗛𝗬𝗣𝗢𝗧𝗛𝗘𝗦𝗜𝗦
If we replace and automate all manual data entry (order data extraction, material matching to the order, and creating the order fulfillment form from the data), and manual communication, then the person-hours spent on order fulfilment can drop from 20 hours per week to <5 hours per week.

𝗦𝗢𝗟𝗨𝗧𝗜𝗢𝗡
The design automates four capabilities using Gemini and ChatGPT, orchestrated by n8n and Make.com. Tools used include:

  • Slack for communication and triggering the automation
  • Google Sheets as the master order tracking sheet
  • Google Doc populating the Production Fulfillment Form.

Order Capture:

  1. Gemini extracts key order details using OCR technology from the purchase order staff download from the 5 sales platforms and drops it into Slack OCR.

  2. Data extracted is saved into a master order tracking Google Sheet.

Populate Materials:

  1. ChatGPT populates corresponding materials by the SKU in the order into the master order tracking Google Sheet.

Human Verification:

  1. Staff update order status once they confirm the accuracy of the order details and spot-check that the corresponding materials are correct.

Notify Production:

  1. Change of order status triggers the population of the Production Fulfillment Form and a Slack message to the downstream Production Worker to start producing the order.

  2. Production Worker updates order status to trigger notification to downstream Shipment team to pick and pack for shipment.

𝗘𝗫𝗘𝗖𝗨𝗧𝗜𝗢𝗡
The design anchored on minimal changes to existing workflows, habits, and tools to reduce the mental load of learning and adoption.

Built a prototype for end users to try for early validation.

Iterated twice based on end-user feedback and observed usage.

Tuned on historical orders until error fell below 5%.

Ran a 2-week production pilot on 2 of 5 channels.

Identified and fixed edge cases before rolling out to all 5 channels.

𝗜𝗠𝗣𝗔𝗖𝗧
Cut manual processing by 85%, saving ~15 person-hours per week in the order fulfillment workflow.

𝗣𝗢𝗦𝗧-𝗟𝗔𝗨𝗡𝗖𝗛
Co-creation model: Built collaboratively with the Highland Feather team to seed further automation across operations, supporting AI Enablement and AI Adoption goals.

Internal champion: An Order Fulfillment champion owns adoption and continues to extend the workflow by adding inventory management automation and a digital fill-station display.

Organic spread: The eCommerce team independently adopted an off-the-shelf AI customer service tool to automate Tier 1 inquiries.

Role
AI Adoption Consultant
For
Highland Feather Manufacturing Inc.
Date
June-Aug '25
Type
AI Adoption, AI Agent, Workflow Automation, Process Mapping, AI /Automation Audit, Service Blueprint
URL
www.highlandfeather.com/
Order Fulfillment Workflow Automation
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