Eliminating 20 Hours of Weekly Manual Work in a Medical Supply Chain

The challenge

The operations team of 8 people spent the first two hours of every morning manually cross-checking POs from their ERP against shipping confirmations from DHL and UPS, then reconciling invoices in SAP. Any discrepancy required manual emails and follow-up. With healthcare compliance requirements, every mismatch had to be logged and resolved before goods could be cleared.

Our approach

We built a Python-based automation suite that polls their ERP API, the DHL and UPS tracking APIs, and the SAP invoice endpoint every 30 minutes. Matching logic auto-reconciles clean records and flags discrepancies into a triage dashboard. A daily digest email summarises overnight activity. The entire suite runs as a set of scheduled AWS Lambda functions.

Results

• 20 hours/week of manual reconciliation eliminated across the ops team
• Discrepancy detection time reduced from next-morning to real-time
• Compliance log automatically populated — audit prep time cut by 80%
• System paid for itself in the first 6 weeks of operation

Technology

• Python
• AWS Lambda
• SAP API
• DHL/UPS API
• PostgreSQL
• SendGrid