Fixing order accuracy at a high-volume butchery and deli
Business: Butchery and deli
Location: Johannesburg, South Africa
Size: In excess of 250 WhatsApp orders a day
Primary service: Workflow Redesign and Automation
Secondary service: AI and Data Implementations
Engagement mode: Design and Implement
Status: Planning
A butchery and deli in South Africa handling in excess of 250 WhatsApp orders a day was losing accuracy and owner time to manual order checking. We were asked to find a solution. We diagnosed the issue and designed a three-phase fix, with planning now underway.
What was the problem?
Orders arrive over WhatsApp in each customer's own words, and how a customer describes a product often does not match how it is listed in the order system. Every order is then typed in by hand and checked line by line before it goes to the floor and factory for fulfillment. That checking fell mostly on the owner, from early morning to evening and into weekends, and it was hard to sustain.
What did we find?
Customer wording does not map to the product names in the order system, so matching depends on the one or two people who know both.
Orders are re-typed by hand from WhatsApp to email to the order system, and each re-entry loses detail.
Special instructions, e.g. thickness, vacuum-packing, make-and-freeze, and delivery timing, are what gets dropped, and they matter most for food safety, trust and customer service.
Orders do not state what unit a quantity refers to, so the same number is read one way at entry and another way at fulfilment, and the customer gets the wrong amount.
What did we do?
Mapped the full order flow, from customer message to fulfilment, and named every role and handoff in it.
Diagnosed the operational root causes and set out where accuracy is lost.
Approached the fix as operational process improvement, redesigning how work moves before adding any tools, in three phases: stabilise checking now, remove the language mismatch at the front end, then extend the channel only if it earns its place.
Built working demo screens of the proposed Claude-powered order-checking tool and tested technical feasibility against the live process.
What is in place so far?
The diagnosis and the three-phase plan are agreed with the owner, and the demo screens give the team a concrete view of how checking will work before any build. The first phase is scoped to take the daily checking load off the owner without changing existing systems or roles. Measurable results will follow once it is installed.
This case study is anonymised. If you would like to hear more about the business behind it, get in touch.
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