One of our long-running clients is a 28-person regional logistics company. When we started with them in 2024, they ran the back office on a Google Sheet, three Line@ groups, and one heroic operations manager who answered phone calls from 7 a.m. The brief in 2026 was simple: "Replace the manual parts. Don't replace the people."
This is the project we are most often asked about, so we wrote it up.
1. What we found in week one
Before quoting, we ran a two-day process audit on site. The kinds of work that stood out: 11 hours per week typing the same six fields from PDF order forms into the ERP; 6 hours per week generating end-of-day delivery reports by copying cells across three sheets; 9 hours per week answering "where is my shipment?" via Line. None of this was strategic work. All of it was billable.
2. What we built (and what we deliberately did not build)
We delivered a Laravel 12 admin dashboard with a row of small, focused automations behind it — not one large "AI brain." Each automation does one job and can be turned off independently. The four that mattered:
An OCR + structured-extraction pipeline that ingests PDF order forms emailed to a dedicated address, extracts the six fields, and writes them straight into the ERP with a confidence score. The operations manager only reviews entries below 95% confidence, which is roughly 4% of orders.
An end-of-day report generator that runs at 18:00, pulls from the same ERP, applies the company's reporting template, and posts the PDF into the management Line group. It replaces the spreadsheet copy-paste entirely.
A "where is my shipment" Line bot that answers customer queries by looking up the tracking ID. The bot does not try to be conversational; it returns one screen with the status, ETA, and last-scan location, plus a button to escalate to a human.
An anomaly digest — a daily one-page email at 09:00 that flags orders sitting in the same status for too long, deliveries scheduled into days the driver isn't working, and any invoice line that doesn't match the original order. This is the only place we use a language model, because the patterns are fuzzy.
3. What we did not do
We did not migrate them off Google Sheets entirely. Two of their five spreadsheets are operationally fine and replacing them would have cost the client more than it saved. We did not build a mobile app. The workforce already lives inside Line; adding another app to maintain would have eroded the gain. We did not promise an AI agent that "runs the company." We delivered four small automations that each do one job, and we documented the off switch for each.
4. The numbers
Twelve weeks after go-live, the operations manager reports about 22 hours per week of recovered time. The "where is my shipment" Line queries dropped 71%. End-of-day report generation went from 50 minutes to under 4 minutes (the 4 minutes is mostly the manager glancing at it before forwarding). No staff were replaced; the operations manager moved into a new client-relationships role we'd been wanting to staff for a year.
5. Why an outsourcing studio is the right partner for this
Three reasons we hear repeatedly from SME clients. First, an in-house IT hire costs a salary; we cost a project. We were on site for ten weeks, then on retainer at a fraction of that cost. Second, we have already seen this exact playbook eight times in 2025-2026, so the build was three weeks instead of three months. Third, when something breaks at 23:00, the client has a contracted SLA with a studio of seven engineers, not a dependency on one person who might be on holiday.
6. The package we now offer
We've productised this engagement. Two-day on-site process audit, fixed-price quote within five working days, three to twelve weeks of build, twelve weeks of bundled support, then a defined retainer. Tech stack: Laravel 12, MySQL 8, Pest, Forge 2.0 + Cloud, plus narrow-purpose AI services where they earn their keep. We deliberately do not lock clients into a custom platform — every automation we build can be re-implemented by any competent Laravel team if they ever choose to leave us. That is a feature, not a bug.
7. If your team has any of the following, we should talk
You have one person who is the single point of failure for end-of-day reporting. You have a Line, WhatsApp, or email channel where the same five questions arrive every day. You have PDFs being retyped into a database. You have spreadsheets that are emailed around with names like "final_v8_REAL_use_this_one.xlsx." You have an internal admin panel that someone built in 2017 and nobody has touched since.
None of these problems require a transformation. They require a few small, well-built automations and someone who has done this enough times to know which corners to cut.