How Laoban Dumplings Replaced a $5,000/Month Ops Agency With Automation

Sep 25, 2025

Natalie Ma

Table of Content

The Challenge

The Solution

The Result

Industry: Food & Beverage

Category: Frozen Foods

Company: Laoban Dumplings

Segment: Mid-Market

The Challenge: Manual Order Entry Across Too Many Systems

Laoban Dumplings was growing fast in wholesale and distribution, working with partners like UNFI, KeHE and other retail distributors. But growth came with operational complexity.

Orders were coming from multiple sources:

EDI through SPS Commerce
Gmail purchase orders
Distributor communications

To process each order, a fractional operations agency had to manually:

Copy and paste EDI and email orders into Cin7
Select the correct SKUs based on stock location
Calculate freight allowances based on shipping warehouse and UNFI distributor
Adjust off-invoice amounts
Confirm routing and allocation

After entering everything into Cin7, the work was not done.

The same orders had to be double-entered into a separate PO tracker spreadsheet just to maintain visibility.

To handle it, Laoban was paying a fractional ops resource $5,000 per month.

“We had someone whose job was essentially moving data between systems. It was necessary, but it wasn’t scalable.”

The Challenge: Manual Order Entry Across Too Many Systems

Laoban Dumplings was growing fast in wholesale and distribution, working with partners like UNFI, KeHE and other retail distributors. But growth came with operational complexity.

Orders were coming from multiple sources:

EDI through SPS Commerce
Gmail purchase orders
Distributor communications

To process each order, a fractional operations agency had to manually:

Copy and paste EDI and email orders into Cin7
Select the correct SKUs based on stock location
Calculate freight allowances based on shipping warehouse and UNFI distributor
Adjust off-invoice amounts
Confirm routing and allocation

After entering everything into Cin7, the work was not done.

The same orders had to be double-entered into a separate PO tracker spreadsheet just to maintain visibility.

To handle it, Laoban was paying a fractional ops resource $5,000 per month.

“We had someone whose job was essentially moving data between systems. It was necessary, but it wasn’t scalable.”

The Solution: Centralize and Automate the Workflow

Laoban implemented Buddy to eliminate manual order translation and double entry.

Standard process: EDI / Gmail → Agency → Cin7 → Spreadsheet Tracker
New process: EDI / Gmail → Buddy → Cin7 & Spreadsheet

Buddy automatically:

Ingested EDI orders from SPS Commerce
Parsed Gmail purchase orders
Mapped SKUs to the correct stock location
Applied freight allowance logic based on distributor and warehouse
Structured the order before pushing to Cin7
Exports for reporting and recordkeeping

The team no longer needed to double-enter orders for visibility.

The Result: $5,000 Per Month Saved

After implementing Buddy:

The fractional ops agency was no longer needed
Manual copy-paste workflows were eliminated
Freight calculations were structured into the system
SKU selection was standardized
Double entry into spreadsheets stopped

The direct impact was immediate. Laoban saved $5,000 per month by removing the external agency. More importantly, they removed a fragile manual process from their core order flow.

Book a demo to see how Buddy can turn your operations into an engine for growth.

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