The Challenge: A Mail-Driven B2B Order Flow That Did Not Scale
INSPIRED Pet Nutrition does not run a traditional webshop. Most of its wholesale B2B orders arrive as unstructured emails with PDFs that must be interpreted manually. Each order is then recreated in one of two ERPs, Tropos and IFS. The dual-ERP setup wasn't a technical choice: INSPIRED Pet Nutrition had acquired another company, and the acquired business kept its existing ERP.
The systems were never consolidated, leaving teams with two disconnected tools and no shared data layer or modern UI, slowing down even the simplest tasks.
The core challenges:
- Unstructured orders: Email-based B2B orders requiring manual reading and translation.
- Two disconnected ERPs: Tropos and IFS running in parallel, each needing separate data entry.
- Fully manual processes: No validations or warnings meant that staff had to manually check every order detail.
The Solution: An AI-Powered OMS Built on Mari Works
Solving this required more than a UI fix. INSPIRED Pet Nutrition needed an OMS that could easily connect two ERPs, support their custom workflows, and scale with the business. Mari Works' modular architecture allowed them to design all operational flows to fit their exact needs, without starting from a blank slate or rebuilding core commerce logic themselves.
Mari Works became the backbone of a new AI-powered OMS that automated the entire flow:
- A customer sends an order via email with PDFs or spreadsheets, which lands in a shared inbox and is forwarded to a dedicated processing inbox.
- The email and attachments are stored in a central storage service, which triggers a webhook in Mari Works.
- A Mari Works workflow fetches the file and sends the content to an AI model, which parses the unstructured data.
- The AI returns structured order details—customers, addresses, line items, quantities—which Mari Works uses to create a draft order.
- The team reviews the draft in a custom Mari Works Admin dashboard, checks validation warnings, and confirms it for syncing to the correct ERP.
Building Without Roadblocks
The development team extended Mari Works with custom modules, workflows, and a tailored Admin UI—all without running into framework limitations. Because Mari Works comes with the core commerce building blocks out of the box, the team could focus fully on the custom parts, adding their own branding, logic, and workflows where the project required them.
The team built faster thanks to clear documentation, open access to source code, and an active global community ready to help when questions came up—a developer experience you can only get with open source.
"Mari Works just allows you to customize and create whatever you want inside the application. I haven't run into any limitations yet." — Jerre Heijnis, Full Stack Developer at rb2
Results: 9x Faster Operations
The new OMS had an immediate impact:
- Order processing is now 9× faster
- ~80% of order emails automatically turned into drafts by AI
- Staff only confirms details—no more manual data entry
- Built-in validations reduced errors significantly
- 80% reduction in operational costs
The project's success laid the groundwork for future growth. The company is now planning to connect a third ERP system following another acquisition and to expand its Mari Works implementation to include a B2B webstore.