The client
A small restaurant group with five Bangkok locations sharing a central commissary kitchen. Around sixty staff in total. Ordering across produce, dry goods, beverage, and packaging suppliers was being done manually by one of the head chefs every Sunday afternoon.
The problem
Sunday ordering was a four-hour spreadsheet exercise. The chef checked stock at every location, looked up historical consumption, called or messaged eight different suppliers, and tried to keep within budget by adjusting order sizes by hand. Errors were common. Last-minute weekday top-up orders were even more common, and they cost more than planned.
The approach
The build moved the inventory ledger out of spreadsheets and into Airtable, with each location updating their actual stock through a simple form on the kitchen iPad after each shift. n8n watched levels nightly. When something fell below its reorder threshold, the system pulled the previous month of consumption, factored in the upcoming week’s bookings, and asked an LLM to draft a clean purchase order for each supplier in the format that supplier expected.
Drafts landed in a Line group at six on Sunday morning. The chef opened them on his phone, made any quick adjustments, and pressed send. Orders went out by email or supplier portal, depending on the supplier.
The result
Sunday ordering went from four hours to about twenty minutes of phone-tapping. Last-minute weekday top-ups dropped by almost a third because the projections were better. The head chef got his Sunday afternoon back. The owner, who had built this routine reluctantly into the head chef’s contract, was just as relieved.
"I used to spend half my Sunday on supplier orders. Now it takes about twenty minutes on my phone over morning coffee. The ordering is more accurate too. Last-minute weekday top-ups dropped by a third in the first month."