How e-kidsplanet Saved 300+ Hours a Year by Automating Supplier Orders in Base.com
E-kidsplanet, an established Polish online retailer specialising in toys and children’s products, was losing dozens of hours every month to manually preparing supplier orders — repetitive, template-driven work carried out several times a week. We built a custom tool that pulls live data from the inventory management system and automatically generates ready-to-send order documents for each supplier individually, saving them to Google Sheets. The time spent on supplier orders dropped by 6 hours a week — 24 hours a month, and over 300 hours a year returned to the business.
The Client and the Challenge
Business Context
E-kidsplanet is an online store with years of established presence in the market, offering a wide range of products for children. Regular stock rotation and relationships with multiple suppliers mean that replenishment orders are not a one-off task — they are a recurring operational rhythm that repeats several times a week, week after week.
The Problem: Hours Spent in a Loop
The ordering process worked like this: each supplier had to receive a separate document listing specific products and quantities. With multiple supplier relationships and five ordering cycles per week, this meant painstaking manual work — checking stock levels, transcribing data, and preparing yet another set of files.
Six hours a week. Twenty-four hours a month. Over three hundred hours a year — spent on a task that requires neither creativity nor expertise. Only time.
There was another problem that was easy to overlook: all documents were stored locally on a single computer — with no backup, no way to access order history remotely, and no foundation for analysing purchasing trends.
The real cost of repetitive work isn’t just time — it’s opportunity cost. Every hour spent transcribing data is an hour not spent on supplier relationships, product development, or sales analysis.
The Solution
Phase 1 — Discovery: Understand the Process Before Building the Tool
We started with a detailed conversation about how the ordering process actually worked — not how it was supposed to work, but how it was carried out in practice every week. We looked at:
- Where stock level data came from and how it was read.
- How order documents were structured for each individual supplier.
- What format, content, and storage expectations the client had for the finished files.
- Where the biggest time losses occurred and where the risk of errors was highest.
This phase allowed us to define precisely what the tool should do — and equally importantly, what it should not do.
Phase 2 — Building the Tool: Simple to Use, Complex Under the Hood
The result was a custom tool designed for daily use by a non-technical team member. From the user’s perspective, it’s straightforward:
- The user creates a list of tasks — each task defines which products should appear in the document and according to what criteria.
- The tool pulls live data from the BASE system (formerly Baselinker) — stock levels, quantities, product details.
- Separate documents are generated automatically for each supplier, following their individual requirements.
- Finished files are saved as Google Sheets to a designated location in Google Drive — accessible immediately, from any device.
Tasks can be run as many times as needed — one click replaces hours of work. A process that previously required manual effort at every ordering cycle now runs like a scheduled routine.
An Additional Benefit: Data Order and Security
Moving documents to Google Drive solved a problem that had been easy to ignore — but was very real. Files stored locally on a single computer are vulnerable to hardware failure. They can’t be accessed outside the office. They offer no way to quickly compare orders across weeks or months.
Google Drive changes all of that: every generated order is automatically saved, accessible from anywhere, and ready for historical analysis — with no additional effort from the team.
Key Results
- 6 hours saved every week on supplier order preparation.
- 24 hours saved every month — three full working days returned to the team each month.
- Over 300 hours saved annually — freed from repetitive, manual work.
- 5 ordering cycles per week now handled with a single click instead of hours of manual effort.
- Automatic backup and archive — no more risk of losing data stored on a local machine.
- Access to order history — a foundation for analysing purchasing trends and improving stock planning.
Expert Perspective
Automation delivers the greatest value where work is repetitive, structured, and data-driven — not necessarily where it’s most difficult. Supplier orders are a textbook example: high frequency, consistent structure, no room for creativity. Exactly the kind of process a tool can execute faster and without error.
What also mattered in the e-kidsplanet project was that the tool had to work for a non-technical user on a daily basis — no training manuals, no technical documentation, no need to involve IT every time it runs. The goal was simple: the user clicks, the documents appear.
Conclusion
Over 300 hours a year is not an abstract number — it’s seven full working weeks, consumed year after year by a single repetitive process. A process that now takes a few seconds.
If your business has similar loops of repetitive work, it’s worth finding out how much time they’re actually costing — and whether they can be eliminated for good.
Let’s talk about where the hidden cost of repetition lives in your business.