ROI and Business Case

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

This document sets out the full financial case for automating your 3PL warehouse coordination process. It translates the time your Operations Coordinator currently spends on manual reconciliation, report downloads, and system updates into a clear dollar figure, then shows exactly what that number looks like after automation is in place. Use this document to confirm the investment decision, understand the payback period, and share the numbers with your finance team.

01What the current process is costing you

The three highest-friction steps in your current process account for the majority of time lost and carry the highest risk of error. Each one is a daily occurrence tied directly to your shipment volume of around 220 events per month.

• Reformat and clean downloaded 3PL data (Step 2): 30 minutes per day, every day. The raw ShipBob CSV export uses a different SKU format from Cin7, so the coordinator manually remaps columns and corrects codes in Google Sheets before any comparison can begin. One wrong SKU alias produces a false discrepancy that ripples through the rest of the process.
• Compare 3PL stock counts to OMS inventory (Step 3): 35 minutes per day. A manual VLOOKUP comparison is run line by line against live Cin7 records. Any formula error or stale Cin7 data means discrepancies are either missed entirely or flagged incorrectly, and there is no audit trail of what was compared versus what was live at that moment.
• Investigate and resolve discrepancies (Step 5): 40 minutes per day on average, but this can stretch to several hours when the 3PL is slow to respond. There is no structured escalation path, no visibility into whether an email to the 3PL has been acknowledged, and no record of how long each case stays open. This is the single most unpredictable cost in the process.

02What changes after automation

Once the three automation agents are live, the daily data pull from ShipBob, SKU normalisation, reconciliation against Cin7, stock updates in both Cin7 and Shopify, Slack notifications, and Google Sheets logging all run without anyone touching them. The one step that stays with your team is investigating and resolving major discrepancies, because those situations require a direct conversation with your 3PL contact and a judgement call on the correct adjustment. Everything else runs on schedule or fires automatically when a webhook is received from ShipBob. Your Operations Coordinator receives a structured Slack summary each morning and only needs to act when a real exception appears.

03Before and after comparison

04Tool costs

05Net ROI summary

06Assumptions log

All figures in this document are based on the volume, rate, and hours confirmed during the process mapping session, supplemented by FullSpec estimates where noted. If any of these inputs change, the numbers scale in a straightforward way. If your shipment volume grows from 220 to 400 events per month, the coordinator time currently spent on manual processing would increase proportionally, making the saving from automation larger. If staff costs rise above $40 per hour due to salary reviews or team changes, the annual saving increases accordingly. If the workflow automation platform is already in your stack, year 1 net saving rises by $1,440 and payback shortens to approximately 3.5 months. Conversely, if your team currently spends fewer than 8 hours per week on this process, enter your actual figure and scale the saving down linearly. FullSpec will update this model with any revised inputs before the build begins.