A 300 Cr Frozen Dessert Brand Eliminated Manual PO Chaos

This is a 300 Cr frozen dessert brand operating in one of India’s most demanding and time-sensitive FMCG categories. Frozen desserts, ice creams, and artisanal treat formats have seen explosive growth across modern trade freezer aisles, quick commerce dark stores, and e-commerce platforms simultaneously. For a brand competing in this space, order execution is not just an operational function. It is a direct expression of how seriously the business takes its channel partners and how reliably it can serve a category where freshness, availability, and delivery timing are everything.

The brand had built a strong product range and a growing channel presence. What it had not built was an order execution infrastructure capable of keeping pace with that growth. The manual processes holding the operation together were creating bottlenecks that were slowing everything down, from SO creation to dispatch scheduling to fill rate visibility, and the business knew it needed to change fast.

The Problem: Manual PO handling at scale

The brand was processing a high volume of POs across MT, Q-Com, and E-Com channels, and doing almost all of it manually. Every incoming PO required a team member to read it, interpret the line items, validate pricing, check SKU cases, apply GST rules, map to the correct warehouse or distributor, and key the data into Microsoft Dynamics 365. At low volumes this is manageable. At the volumes a 300 Cr brand processes across three active channels, it becomes the single biggest constraint in the entire fulfilment operation.

PO errors and amendments compounded the problem. When a channel partner sent a PO with a pricing discrepancy, an incorrect SKU case configuration, or a GST mismatch, the SO couldn’t be created until the issue was resolved. This required back-and-forth with the customer, internal corrections, and resubmission, all of which delayed SO creation, pushed back appointment scheduling, and disrupted the dispatch calendar downstream. In a quick commerce environment where delivery windows are measured in hours, these delays were not just inconvenient. They were commercially significant.

There was no single view of POs across direct and distributor-fulfilled channels. Orders coming through direct MT relationships lived in one place. Orders being fulfilled through distributors lived somewhere else. Reconciling these two streams, understanding what had been ordered versus what had been fulfilled across the full channel picture, required manual effort that was rarely timely and often incomplete.

Fill rate visibility and SLA adherence were effectively blind spots. The team had no real-time mechanism to track whether orders were on track to meet the commitments made to channel partners. By the time a gap became visible, it was usually too late to do anything about it before the delivery window closed.

The Solution: Manual chaos to real-time execution

The brand partnered with Finifi to replace manual PO processing with an intelligent, automated order execution layer integrated directly with Microsoft Dynamics 365. The implementation was completed and the brand went live in three days, a deployment speed that reflects both the urgency the business felt and the readiness of Finifi’s platform to configure quickly against real operational requirements.

Sales Order Automation

Real-time SO creation in Dynamics 365 with no manual punching is the core of what changed. Finifi reads each incoming PO, processes it through the validation layer, and creates an ERP-ready Sales Order automatically, without a team member having to touch it. The moment a valid PO arrives, the SO exists in the system and the fulfilment chain can begin. What had previously taken manual effort per order now happens in seconds, at any volume, across all three channels simultaneously.

Automated PO Validation

Finifi’s AI-led PO reading and validation engine handles the variability of incoming POs across MT, Q-Com, and E-Com formats. Each channel partner’s PO structure is different. The engine extracts the relevant data, maps it to the correct Dynamics 365 fields, and validates it against defined parameters before anything is posted. POs that pass validation move forward automatically. Those that don’t are surfaced as clearly defined exceptions with the specific reason flagged, so the team can resolve them quickly rather than discovering them mid-fulfilment.

Unified Business Rule Engine

Business rule checks covering pricing, MRP, SKU cases, GST, warehouse mapping, and distributor mapping run against every incoming PO as part of the automated processing cycle. These checks happen daily across all channels, ensuring that the commercial and compliance parameters the business has defined are enforced consistently at the point of order entry, not discovered as discrepancies after the SO has already been created and appointments have been scheduled.

Unified Exception Management

Centralized exception and amendment tracking gives the team a single, structured view of everything that needs their attention across all channels. Rather than chasing exceptions across separate channel processes and inboxes, the team works from one place. Amendments are tracked, exceptions are prioritized, and the team has full visibility into the status of every flagged item from the moment it is raised to the moment it is resolved.

Real Time Fulfilment Tracking

Fill rate tracking using invoices issued against customer POs gives the business the real-time visibility into fulfilment performance that was previously missing entirely. The team can now see, at any point, what has been ordered, what has been invoiced, and where gaps exist across channels. SLA adherence is no longer a retrospective measurement. It is a live operational input that the team can act on before a delivery window closes.

Went live in three days and the impact was immediate. Orders that used to pile up waiting for manual processing now create themselves in Dynamics as soon as the PO arrives. Our team finally has the time and visibility to focus on execution quality rather than just keeping up.

The Transformation: Immediate impact felt across the operation

The speed of the transformation at this brand was unusual and worth noting. Going live in three days meant the business was not waiting months for an implementation to deliver value. The team experienced the shift almost immediately, and the contrast with how things had worked before was sharp.

The most visible change was in how the morning started. Where the day had previously begun with a queue of POs waiting to be manually processed, appointments already at risk of being delayed by data entry that hadn’t caught up, it now began with SOs already created, exceptions clearly flagged, and a manageable list of items that genuinely needed human attention. The volume of routine work that had consumed the team’s time simply disappeared.

Across MT, order confirmation became faster and more reliable. Buyers who had previously experienced delays between PO submission and SO confirmation now received faster turnaround, which improved the brand’s execution reputation with channel partners who track these things carefully. Across Q-Com, where the fulfilment window between order and delivery is already compressed, the elimination of manual SO creation removed one of the most significant sources of delay in the entire chain.

The distributor channel, which had previously operated with limited visibility from the brand’s side, was brought into the same unified view. For the first time, the team could see primary sales performance across direct and distributor-fulfilled orders in one place, giving commercial leadership a complete picture of how the business was actually performing across its full channel footprint.