ROI and Business Case

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

This document makes the financial case for automating your order processing and fulfilment workflow. It translates the time your team spends today into a clear dollar cost, shows what that cost falls to after the two agents go live, and lays out the net return on the one-off build investment. All figures are drawn from your confirmed process data: 280 orders per month, a Fulfilment Coordinator at $45/hour, and 9 hours of manual admin absorbed every week by this single process.

01What the current process is costing you

The three highest-friction steps in your current process are the ones that consume the most time, generate the most re-work, and are most exposed to human error. Each one listed below is a confirmed bottleneck from your process mapping session.

• Verify Stock Availability in Cin7 (Step 2, 12 min per order batch): A coordinator manually cross-references every order line against Cin7 before anything else can move. When stock records are out of date, valid orders are held and out-of-stock orders are not caught until fulfilment has already begun, creating a cascade of re-work and customer complaints.
• Book Courier and Print Shipping Label in StarShipIt (Step 6, 7 min per order): Staff log into StarShipIt, manually enter or import each order, select a courier service by hand, and print the label. At 280 orders per month this is the single largest discrete time sink in the process, and a mis-keyed address at this step results in a failed delivery and a full re-ship cost.
• Create Sales Invoice in Xero (Step 3, 8 min per order): Line items, customer details, and totals are re-entered from Shopify into Xero by hand. This step adds no value and exists solely because the two systems are not connected. Every manual entry is an opportunity for an amount or SKU mismatch that requires correction later.

02What changes after automation

After the two agents go live, the admin chain from paid order to dispatched parcel runs without manual input. The Order Intake Agent watches Shopify for new paid orders, checks Cin7 stock levels for every SKU in real time, and either passes the order downstream or sends a Slack alert for the one scenario that needs a human: a confirmed stock shortfall. The Fulfilment Dispatch Agent then creates the Xero invoice, books the courier in StarShipIt, retrieves the tracking number, updates Shopify, and sends the customer their confirmation email, all within minutes of the order being placed. Your team keeps exactly one decision point: reviewing the Slack alert when stock is short and deciding how to proceed. Every other step is handled end to end by FullSpec's automation.

03Before and after comparison

04Tool costs

05Net ROI summary

06Assumptions log

All numbers in this document are calculated at the confirmed volume of 280 orders per month and a coordinator rate of $45/hour. If your order volume increases, the staff saving scales proportionally because more orders means more time absorbed by the manual steps the automation eliminates. For example, at 400 orders per month the weekly admin burden on the current process would rise to approximately 13 hours per week, pushing the annual staff cost closer to $29,000 and widening the net ROI gap further. Conversely, if the business brings on additional staff or changes the role rate, FullSpec can rerun the model with updated inputs. The build cost and tool cost lines do not change with volume, so the economics improve as the business grows. If you have questions about any figure in this document, contact the FullSpec team at support@gofullspec.com.