Orders out by cutoff.Without it ridingon one person.
Tomato Automate builds complex automated systems for 3PL warehouses, fulfillment centers and distribution facilities.
Most warehouses run on a layer of re-keyed orders, stock checks and month-end billing spreadsheets that nobody has ever priced. A twenty-minute call tells you what’s sitting in yours, and whether it’s worth building.
30-day satisfaction guaranteeAcross the Tomato Automate portfolio
From order drop to client invoice.
The work between your systems is where we start.
Stores + EDI + WMS
An order drops in.
Source
Orders arrive from everywhere
Shopify, a marketplace, an EDI feed or a client’s email. The odd ones usually get keyed in by hand.
Automated work
Read, check, release
Each order is pulled into the WMS, checked for address, SKU and ship method, and released to the floor.
Outcome
Clean orders hit the floor
A bad address or an unknown SKU is held for a person, with the reason attached.
No re-keying. Nothing sitting in an inbox past cutoff.
ASN + WMS
A container is at the dock.
Source
The receipt starts
The ASN says what should be on it. What comes off is not always the same.
Automated work
Count against the ASN
Receipts are matched line by line to the ASN and the client’s PO. Clean lines go to available stock.
Outcome
Discrepancies reach a person
Shorts, overs and damage go to the right person with the ASN and the count side by side.
Stock is sellable sooner. The client hears about a short the same day.
WMS + stores + marketplaces
A SKU starts running low.
Source
Stock moves all day
Picks, receipts and adjustments change what is on hand, and every channel needs the new number.
Automated work
Sync and watch
On-hand counts go out to each store and marketplace. SKUs below their reorder point get flagged.
Outcome
Nobody oversells
The client gets a low-stock alert before they sell what is not on the shelf.
One stock number, everywhere the SKU is sold.
WMS + shipping software
A pick comes up short.
Source
The order is on the floor
Most orders pick and pack clean. Some hit a short pick, a wrong bin or a box that does not fit.
Automated work
Sort it, then ship it
Exceptions go to a lead with the order open. Clean orders are rate-shopped, labelled and marked shipped.
Outcome
Tracking goes back
Tracking numbers flow back to the store or the customer without anyone pasting them in.
The floor packs. The paperwork follows on its own.
Returns + WMS + client rules
A return comes back.
Source
A parcel lands at returns
It may or may not have an RMA, and every client has their own rules for what happens next.
Automated work
Match and grade
The return is matched to its order and RMA, graded, and sorted by that client’s rules.
Outcome
Restock or write off
Good stock goes back to available. The rest is written off or held, and the client is told.
Returns stop piling up in a corner of the building.
WMS + accounting
The month closes.
Source
Every activity is billable
Storage, receiving, pick fees, packaging and special projects, spread across a month of work.
Automated work
Rate it and total it
Activity is pulled from the WMS and priced against each client’s rate card.
Outcome
Invoices and reports go out
Each client gets an invoice and a plain report. Odd charges wait for a person to approve.
Special projects get billed. Nobody rebuilds a spreadsheet at month end.
Illustrative workflows · configured around your operation
They gained 158 hours a week.
A brokerage, not a warehouse. The method is the one we would run on your floor. Four dispatchers’ worth of busywork, removed from the week.
They were growing and still drowning. Most of the day went on work no piece of their software owned: chasing information between teams, re-entering the same details, catching the things that would otherwise slip. Every new customer meant another seat.
We mapped it first, cut the steps that earned nothing, and built the system against the protocol that came out of it. The work now starts itself, routes itself, and raises personnel only when judgment is needed.
Same team, and growth stopped costing a hire each time.
Hours of manual work removed per week
Loads per week at handover
Accessorials recovered in year one
The operation runs. But it relies on your best employees.
The layer none of your software can see.
Your systems hold the data. Personnel do the connecting. That connecting work lives in messages, in documents and in a few people’s heads, and it never shows up on a single report you run.
What the manual layer costs you in a year.
Most warehouses have never added it up. Move the sliders to your numbers. It is an illustration you can check, not a quote.
How this estimate is calculated
- Annual volume assumes 52 weeks. Desk work is weekly orders × minutes per order ÷ 60 × hourly cost × 52. One full-time equivalent is 40 hours per week.
- Revenue is weekly orders × revenue per order × 52. Gross margin is assumed to be 14% of revenue. Slow-response losses are estimated at 2% of that gross margin.
- Rework assumes 1.5% of orders need a correction, like a mispick, a bad address or a reship. Each correction costs 45 minutes of labor plus 30% of the order’s assumed gross margin.
- Overtime and turnover add 12% of labor cost. Share of your revenue is the total estimate divided by revenue. Potential recovery is 70% of the total estimated cost, before implementation or maintenance fees.
The new era of visibility.
Your reports are a photograph. This is the live feed.
A report is last month, assembled by hand. A dashboard is the six numbers somebody chose once. A CRM knows what was typed into it. A digital twin reads every system your operation runs on, as it changes, into one model you can look at and ask.
Satisfaction guarantee
If you are not satisfied in the first thirty days, you get your money back. No questions, and you keep the documented SOPs we produced along the way.
Map it. Build it. Keep optimizing it.
Automating a process you have not mapped just runs the mess faster. So we map first, then decide what to automate and in what order.
We map how the work actually moves
The same proprietary process behind every system we build, applied to your actual operation. Where the work starts, every hand-off, every place it stalls, and what each of those stalls costs you in a week. You come out of it with your operation on paper and an automation map ranked by payoff. Plenty of what it surfaces is fixable in a week, with or without us.
System design
We build what the map laid out, inside the tools you already run. We phase the rollout on purpose, one workflow at a time, stabilized before we expand, because nothing we ship is allowed to interrupt the work.
Maintenance and optimization
By now the system runs around 70% autonomy. From here we adapt it to wherever the business goes: a new customer, a new service line, a new system. Strategy changes should not mean starting over. How fast that curve climbs depends on the operation. Every client who started with a map has stayed.
First, we map your operation.
Every process in your operation written down and searchable, so anyone on the floor can look up what to do. Then the automation map: every opportunity scored, ranked and costed, with the build spec attached to each one. You decide what gets built and in what order. It is sold on its own, so you can buy the map without committing to a single hour of build.
Illustrative Redprint excerpts
Current State Assessment
How work actually moves through your business today, department by department. Where it leaks, where it depends on memory instead of system, and where it is ready to automate.
Current vs Ideal SOP
Every process documented as it runs today, then redesigned. Unnecessary steps cut, handoffs simplified, everything that does not add value removed.
Automation Map
Every opportunity scored on hours reclaimed, difficulty and impact, then sorted into build first, build later, and do not build. Each one comes with the architecture to build it.
POST. Deduped on message ID so a resend never runs twice.{type, account, urgency, value}confidence ≥ 0.85 assigns itself. Below that it queues for the respective personnel, reasoning attached.Business Transformation Report
The business case for the build. A phased roadmap projecting hours reclaimed, costs eliminated and autonomy gained, written so you can take it to your next board meeting.
- 01How the work actually moves through your business today
- 02What you have already tried, and where it came apart
- 03Whether there is enough here to be worth building
You will be talking to the people who would actually build it. If there is something worth doing, we will tell you what it would look like. If there is not, then we build a relationship.
From disconnected tasks to one connected operation.
Same team. Same day. A different operation.
The same people, shipping a great deal more.
Every operation below was running on people and memory.
The people who stopped standing in the middle.
These guys are something else. What I thought was automation was not even close to the monster they’ve built for my business.
We had been sold automation twice before and got dashboards. This time somebody actually mapped how we run first.
Peak used to mean temps and overtime. Last peak we moved a third more freight with the same ops floor.
I was the escalation path for everything. I am not in the middle of it any more, and nothing has fallen over.
Five rules we do not break.
Most automation looks good in a pitch and falls apart by Tuesday. These are why ours does not.
Custom over template, every time.
No successful business fits a template. Yours runs on the things one person figured out and three people remember. The workaround that saved a deal last year. The step someone added after something broke. Templates erase all of it. We build to your operation, including the parts that do not fit on a flowchart.
Agentic where it earns its place. Deterministic everywhere else.
Language models are the wrong tool for “always do X when Y happens”. That is a workflow. We use reasoning where decisions need judgment, and deterministic logic for the rest. Most demos invert this and pay for it in production.
Human-in-the-loop until the system earns autonomy.
Every workflow ships behind a checkpoint. We watch it run for two to four weeks and only remove the gate when the error rate sits below your tolerance. That is how autonomy climbs without breaking the operation.
RPA is a fallback, not a strategy.
API first when the integration exists. Browser automation when it does not. RPA gets a bad name because shops lead with it. We use it surgically, for the exact cases where the system you depend on has no API and you cannot swap it.
We keep only what the project needs.
We work inside your accounts and systems wherever we can, and keep only what the project needs, in SOC 2-audited tools. We have access while we are working with you. If we ever stop working together, our access goes away. Your data was never ours to take.
The questions operators actually ask.
If your question is not here, email is the fastest way to get a real answer about your operation.
Email us directlyWill you replace the WMS we already run on?
Will this work with the systems we already run?
Our clients send orders by EDI, email and spreadsheet. Can you handle the mix?
What do you actually automate?
Will this replace my warehouse staff?
Our team is not especially technical. Is that a problem?
How long until we see something real?
What happens if an automation fails the night before a cutoff?
What about our data, and our clients’ data?
Can we buy the Redprint without committing to a build?
What does a full build cost?
Peak can double our volume. Does that matter?
- 01How the work actually moves through your business today
- 02What you have already tried, and where it came apart
- 03Whether there is enough here to be worth building
You will be talking to the people who would actually build it. If there is something worth doing, we will tell you what it would look like. If there is not, then we build a relationship.