Five Times Faster Fulfilment on a Legacy ERP

LEE Distributors ran on a legacy ERP that could not keep up with modern order management. The webshop and the ERP lived in separate worlds, so orders had to be moved and reconciled by hand, and the warehouse work of packing and shipping was manual and paper-heavy.

That created the usual costs of a paper process at scale: slow throughput, room for picking and packing mistakes, and no clean record of what shipped to whom. Replacing the ERP outright was not the goal. It held data and logic the business still relied on. The job was to make it work like a modern system without ripping it out.

There was a second, harder constraint. As a high-value distributor, LEE treats uptime and security as non-negotiable. Any new system had to be faster and easier to use, and also harder to take down. It had to keep running through a demanding threat environment, not just on a quiet day.

We built a web application and an Android app that sit between the webshop and the legacy ERP and automate the full fulfilment path, without replacing the ERP underneath.

Orders flow in from the webshop and are bridged to the ERP automatically, so the two systems stay in step without manual re-keying. From there the platform takes over the warehouse work. It picks the best carrier and service for each order, and prints every shipping label automatically to Zebra printers across the floor. Staff scan each item into a box on Zebra handhelds and mark it packed, so what goes into the box is verified rather than assumed. Customers get their own portal where they can track shipments and see the full packing specification, every box and every item it contains.

Because uptime and security were core requirements, we hardened the platform with specific security techniques and a resilient hosting setup, so it stays online under load and under attack.

Paperwork dropped to a third of what it was, and order processing became five times faster. Because every item is scanned into its box before the order is marked packed, pick-and-pack errors were eliminated.

Just as important for a high-value distributor, the platform has run with zero downtime to date, including through attempted attacks. The security hardening was not a checkbox; it is why the system stays up when it is targeted. The platform is in daily use across the warehouse, and we continue to maintain and extend it.

The instinct with a struggling legacy ERP is to replace it. Often the better move is to leave it in place and build around it.

LEE's ERP still held logic and data the business depended on. Wrapping it with a modern web layer, instead of migrating off it, removed the risk of a big-bang cutover and got the warehouse a faster process much sooner. The hard engineering was in the seams: keeping two systems in sync reliably, and hardening the new layer enough that adding it did not add an attack surface. If we did it again, the approach would be the same. Modernize at the edges first, and only touch the core system if and when there is a clear reason to.