The catalogue, the orders, and the correspondence, mapped and costed

Pataaree runs a product catalogue and manages orders and client correspondence by hand. As the range and the order volume grew, the coordination work grew faster than the actual selling.

The catalogue lived in one place, orders arrived across email and DMs, and client correspondence was typed from scratch each time. Someone was spending hours a day reformatting the same information between the same two or three systems. The founder had already tried delegating it and found that teaching the work took longer than doing it.

Catalogue updates were the obvious candidate. What surprised us was the correspondence thread: a full day a week of routine replies that could be drafted automatically and approved by a person. That one wasn't on the original list.

The report recommended two builds and said plainly which one to start with. The correspondence drafting system was the first, implemented by the client's own team using the report as the brief.

The recommendation gave them a plan they could execute with their own team. The drafting system recovered most of a day a week, and the catalogue automation became a candidate for a later phase rather than an immediate build.

The catalogue data was not structured for automation, and fixing that properly took longer than the report allowed for. The report said so explicitly rather than pretending the build was a two-day job.

“What I'd expected was a strategy document. What I got was something we could actually use, and quickly. They were direct about what wasn't worth doing, which I hadn't had from anyone in this space before. A day a week back on correspondence alone. Worth the conversation for the clarity alone.”

Shagun Bawa

Founder, Pataaree

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