Take an order all the way to the doorstep

This is the recipe where the handoff matters more than any single employee. Four narrow roles that pass work along beat one broad role, for a specific reason: the employee that validates orders should not be able to issue a refund, and the one that spots a stockout should not be able to spend money fixing it.

The chain

order placed → order-fulfillment-manager validates, routes, confirms ship → inventory-manager recomputes stock, spots reorder point → procurement-coordinator costs the reorder, requests approval → shipping-returns-specialist watches delivery, handles returns money at any point → accounting, never handled in the chain

Steps

Build it one link at a time

Do not install all four and wire them together. Run fulfilment alone for a week, then add inventory, and so on. A four-employee chain that misbehaves is very hard to debug, because the symptom appears in a different employee from the cause.

Define what "cannot cleanly ship" means

The fulfilment employee's real job is deciding what to hold. Be specific, because the default behaviour of a helpful assistant is to push things through.

Hold and escalate rather than routing, when: - Address fails validation or is a known freight-forwarder - Order value is above £750 - The customer has an open dispute or chargeback - Any line item is out of stock or backordered - Billing and shipping countries differ - It is the customer's first order and the value is above £300 Never cancel. Never refund. Hold, and say why.

Watch the store rather than polling

"trigger": { "type": "watch", "plugin": "...", "event": "order.created" }

Wire the handoffs with events

// fulfilment finishes "emit": "order.routed" // inventory listens "trigger": { "type": "event", "sources": ["order.routed"] } // inventory finishes with a shortfall "emit": "stock.below_reorder_point" // procurement listens "trigger": { "type": "event", "sources": ["stock.below_reorder_point"] }

Each employee knows only its own trigger and its own emit. None of them holds the whole chain in its head, which is what keeps a failure local.

Give procurement a hard spend ceiling

Never issue a purchase order above £2,000 without approval. Never onboard a new vendor. Only order from vendors already on the approved list. If the only available vendor is not approved, stop and tell me.

Set the gates

Stays human

Refunds and cancellations, on every employee in the chain. Vendor onboarding, always. Any purchase order over your ceiling. Proactive customer messages about a late delivery should start gated — a message saying an order is delayed is still a message that shapes a customer's day.

Verify

Place a test order and follow it through all four employees
Place one that should be held, and confirm it is held with the right reason
Drive an item below its reorder point and confirm procurement asks rather than buys
Confirm no employee in the chain can issue a refund
Break one employee's connection and confirm the others degrade rather than stall entirely

When it goes wrong

An order stalls between two employees

The upstream workflow ended with empty output, which terminates the branch and means nothing was emitted. Check the last step produced something affirmative.

The same order is processed twice

Two triggers are firing for one event, usually a watch and a schedule both active during migration. Turn one off.

Reorder quantities are wrong

Lead time is missing from the calculation. A reorder point without supplier lead time is just a low-stock alert.