For warehouses & 3PLs
Your team answers “where's my order?” forty times a day.
None of those forty answers needed a person. Neither did most of the label printing, the receipting, or the report you rebuild every month.
The five places it goes
You’ll know within about four seconds which of these is costing you the most.
- Courier bookings and labels done by hand, order by order, all day
- “Where's my order?” answered by a person reading a tracking screen
- Client reports rebuilt in a spreadsheet at the end of every month
- Inbound receipting keyed twice — once on the dock, once in the system
- Exceptions discovered when the customer complains, not before
What the volume does to it
Small per-shipment savings compound in a way they don’t anywhere else — that’s the whole reason automation pays here.
Say you move 200 shipments a day and two minutes of each one is manual handling that shouldn’t be. That’s nearly seven hours a day across the team — most of a full-time role, spent on keystrokes.
Add 40 tracking enquiries a day at three minutes each. Another two hours, all of it answerable automatically before the customer thinks to ask.
Your numbers won’t be these numbers. But they’ll be the same shape, and they’re easy to check — count the shipments, time the handling, multiply.
The systems you’re already running
Most NZ operations this size are on Starshipit for shipping and labels, a warehouse system like 3PL Central or something bespoke behind it, NZ Post, CouriersPlease and Mainfreight on the carrier side, client stores on Shopify or WooCommerce, and Cin7 or Unleashed upstream where the client holds their own inventory. Xero underneath all of it.
Every one of those has a way in. The work is almost never building something new — it’s connecting what you’ve got so the same consignment isn’t entered three times.
Where the pipeline leaks in your language
- 01
Be findable
Shippers can't tell what you actually handle
- 02
The rate enquiry
Someone builds the rate by hand, again
- 03
The booking
Labels and consignments keyed one at a time
- 04
Pick & dispatch
Nobody knows it's stuck until the customer rings
- 05
Keep the contract
You can't show what you did well
What we’d automate
- Order in, label out, tracking notification sent — as one chain with no manual step in the middle
- Proactive exception alerts, so the stuck consignment surfaces before the complaint does
- Client-facing status updates, or a report that builds itself instead of being assembled
- Monthly billing data pulled from actual movements rather than reconstructed
- Inbound receipting entered once and flowing through to stock on hand
Where AI earns its keep here
Forty “where’s my order?” emails a day get read, matched to the right consignment, and answered with live tracking before anyone on your team sees them.
The half that matters more is what gets escalated. The ones that aren’t really tracking questions, and the consignments that are genuinely stuck, get pushed at a human instead of buried in an automatic reply. Automation that hides a problem is worse than no automation, and that’s the thing worth being careful about in this industry.
When we’d tell you not to bother
If you haven’t got a warehouse system yet, buy one before you talk to us. Connecting things together can’t make up for a system that isn’t there, and we’d be selling you an expensive answer to the wrong question.
We also won’t design your warehouse, your racking or your pick paths. That’s a different profession and there are people who are genuinely good at it.
Where to start
Start with a conversation
No charge and no pitch. If we’re not the right people for the problem, we’ll tell you and point you somewhere better.
Free · no pitch
You tell us what’s slow or manual. We ask the questions we’d ask any new client. By the end you’ll know whether we can help, roughly what it would involve, and what it would cost.
We work evenings and weekends, so there are a limited number of slots each week. Trades tend to ring rather than book — info@nullnil.net works just as well.