Order cancellation alerts
How a global shoe and active-wear brand went from discovering a weekend of wrongly cancelled orders to being warned about it within the hour.
Direct to consumer, always on.
Our client is a globally leading shoe and active-wear manufacturer. Alongside its retail partners it sells direct to consumers through its own website, where customers order products straight from the brand.
With thousands of product offerings, it is essential that the sales order process runs smoothly. The client had already automated one part of it: if the inventory for an order could not be confirmed within a certain timeframe, the order was cancelled automatically.
A weekend of cancellations.
One Monday morning the client discovered that over the weekend an excessive number of orders had been cancelled unnecessarily. Solving that became a top priority.
Because the automatic cancellation had been running successfully for some time and was part of day-to-day operations, the client was unsure how to proceed without disrupting the flow of business.
An hourly alert, built where the data already was.
DataLane was already working on a Process Mining project within the sales order process, and was consulted the moment the issue arose. The sales order data had been integrated into the Celonis EMS cloud during that project, so everything needed to investigate was already there.
It quickly became clear that reworking the existing automation would be too large a project for the client’s immediate need. Together with DataLane, the client decided that an hourly automated alert would suffice: it warns designated team members at specific distribution centres whenever the automated cancellation rate is abnormally high.
DataLane wrote a technical definition so that only the relevant cancellations were targeted, then built an analysis in Celonis that checks the cancellation rate every hour. An automated workflow — also in Celonis — sends the alert by e-mail and Microsoft Teams, so corrective action can be taken quickly.
- Client
- Global shoe & active-wear manufacturer
- Process
- Sales order, direct to consumer
- Platform
- Celonis EMS
- Time to production
- Under one month
What made it hard to fix
- A large order volume running through the website, 24/7
- Only certain distribution centres were affected
- Orders could be cancelled for any number of reasons — not only by the automation
What it delivered — and what made it stick.
Business value
- Live in under a month, so the client saw results almost immediately.
- Lost revenue avoided: a spike is caught within the hour instead of over a weekend.
- Root-cause analysis on the spot, from the same data that raises the alert.
- Renewed trust in the sales order process — and in the automation behind it.
Adoption
- Alerts arrive where the work already happens: e-mail and Microsoft Teams.
- Named owners per distribution centre, so every alert has someone to act on it.
- Runs unattended every hour, weekends included, across all six centres.
- Analysis and workflow both live in Celonis, so the client’s own team can adjust the thresholds.
Recognise this in your own process?
Tell us where orders, cases or invoices go missing. We’ll show you what the data says.
Start a conversation