Supplement Company: SOS Inventory & Automated Fulfillment
Integrated SOS Inventory to give a supplement brand accurate real-time stock visibility, and built an end-to-end automation that ingested Shopify orders and dispatched production jobs directly to an industrial capsule-filling machine — removing human intervention from the fulfillment process entirely.
!The Challenge
The client manufactured custom supplement capsules in-house using an industrial filling machine, but the entire process was manual: staff would receive Shopify orders, calculate production quantities, and manually program the machine for each run. Inventory tracking was done in spreadsheets, making it impossible to accurately forecast stock or prevent overselling. As order volume grew, the manual process became a bottleneck and a source of costly fulfillment errors.
Our Approach
- 1Audited the existing order workflow and machine input specifications to map the full automation surface
- 2Integrated SOS Inventory with the Shopify store to provide real-time inventory sync and stock-level visibility
- 3Built automated reorder triggers and low-stock alerts based on configurable thresholds per SKU
- 4Developed a Shopify webhook listener that captured new orders and parsed ingredient and quantity requirements
- 5Translated order data into the machine's required input format and dispatched production jobs programmatically
- 6Implemented a monitoring layer with error alerting and a manual override interface for edge cases
Results
- Eliminated manual order-to-machine programming entirely, removing the main fulfillment bottleneck
- Production jobs dispatched within minutes of order placement, accelerating fulfillment cycle times
- Inventory accuracy improved dramatically with real-time SOS Inventory sync
- Overselling incidents eliminated through live stock tracking connected to the Shopify storefront
- Staff redeployed from data entry to higher-value tasks as the automation handled routine production scheduling