ROI and Business Case

[YourCompany.com] · Fulfilment Department · Prepared by FullSpec · [Today's Date]

This document sets out the financial case for automating your order processing and fulfilment flow. It quantifies what the current manual process costs in staff time and error-driven rework, shows what those numbers look like after automation, and gives you a clear view of build cost, tool costs, net saving, and payback period. All figures are drawn from your confirmed process mapping session and FullSpec benchmarking data. No technical knowledge is needed to read this document. Your role is to review the numbers, check the assumptions in section 06, and decide whether to proceed.

01What the current process is costing you

The three highest-friction steps in your current process are listed below. Each one is a point where manual data handling introduces delay, error risk, or both. Together they account for roughly half of the 14 hours lost each week.

• Step 1: Export New Orders from Shopify (15 min per run, multiple times per shift). Orders placed between batch exports sit idle, pushing fulfilment past carrier cut-off windows. Failure mode: orders miss the daily despatch deadline and require next-day re-routing at higher cost.
• Step 2: Check Inventory Availability in Linnworks (20 min per shift run). The coordinator manually cross-references each order line against live stock counts. Failure mode: count drift between Shopify and Linnworks causes in-stock items to be flagged as out-of-stock or vice versa, generating avoidable exception handling.
• Step 7: Create Shipping Label in ShipStation (15 min per batch). Order data already in Shopify is re-entered manually into ShipStation to generate each label. Failure mode: copy-paste errors produce wrong addresses or carrier selections, leading to mis-routed parcels, refunds, and re-ships that erode margin on already thin DTC orders.

02What changes after automation

Once the three FullSpec agents are live, the data-handling tasks that consume 11 hours of coordinator time each week are handled automatically. The Order Routing Agent checks stock the moment a Shopify payment fires. The Label and Despatch Agent creates the label, writes the tracking number back to Shopify, and logs the shipping cost to Xero. The Customer Notification Agent sends the branded tracking email through Klaviyo within seconds of despatch confirmation. The one decision point that stays with your team is the review of exception orders where a SKU is flagged as out of stock. That alert arrives in Slack with all the order detail your fulfilment manager needs to act, so no platform-switching is required even for the manual step.

03Before and after comparison

04Tool costs

05Net ROI summary

06Assumptions log

These figures are based on a confirmed order volume of approximately 110 orders per day and a $40 loaded hourly rate. If your actual volume is higher, the savings scale proportionally. At 150 orders per day (the upper end of your stated range), weekly manual time would increase beyond 14 hours in the current state, making the post-automation saving larger and the payback period shorter. Conversely, if your coordinator rate is lower than $40 per hour, the staff cost saving reduces but the time saving and error-reduction benefits remain the same. FullSpec recommends reviewing these figures with your actual wage data before final sign-off. The tool costs shown are based on published pricing at the time of scoping and may change with plan upgrades or usage growth, particularly Klaviyo, which charges on a per-contact or per-send basis above certain thresholds. Contact support@gofullspec.com if you want a revised scenario run against your exact numbers.