How a Kettering Bakery Automated 90% of Their Admin with AI

E'Manuel Foods & Bakery is a Nigerian-style bread bakery in Kettering that delivers fresh bread across the Midlands. When we started working together, the owner — Tunmise — was spending his evenings on admin instead of his family. Every order came through WhatsApp. Every payment was manually tracked. Every production quantity was hand-tallied.

Three weeks later, the entire operation runs on 9 automated workflows. Tunmise checks a dashboard for 60 seconds each morning. That's it. Here is exactly what we built and how it works.

The Problem: Hours of Admin Every Evening

E'Manuel handles 140–180 orders every week. Before automation, the workflow looked like this:

1. Order collection (2+ hours): Customers sent WhatsApp messages saying things like “2 agege bread, 1 white bread, deliver to 14 Park Street.” Tunmise manually copied each order into a spreadsheet. Messages were often incomplete or contradictory.
2. Payment tracking (2+ hours): Customers paid via SumUp (card) or bank transfer. SumUp generates its own transaction reference — breaking the link between order and payment. Tunmise cross-referenced amounts, names, and timing across two separate systems to figure out who had paid.
3. Production planning (1 hour): Hand-tallying how many of each bread type to bake. Get the number wrong and you overbake (waste) or underbake (unhappy customers).
4. Delivery planning (1 hour): Routes planned from memory. No optimisation, no grouping by area.
5. Customer updates (1+ hours): Manually messaging each customer to confirm their order was received and when to expect delivery.

The business was growing — 140 orders per week when we started, now over 180 — but the admin was growing faster. Tunmise was spending more time running the business than baking bread.

The Solution: 9 Automated Workflows

We replaced the entire manual process with 9 interconnected AI workflows, built on n8n (an open-source automation platform) and deployed to the cloud. Here is what each one does:

The Dashboard: 60 Seconds Every Morning

On top of the 9 workflows, we built a password-protected client dashboard at a custom URL. Tunmise logs in each morning and sees:

• Order summary: Total orders, revenue, paid vs unpaid breakdown
• Unpaid customers: Names, amounts, and days since order — with a one-tap WhatsApp button to message them
• Production quantities: Exactly how much of each product to bake
• Delivery stops: Grouped by town with navigation links
• System health: All 9 workflows showing green/amber/red status

The dashboard auto-refreshes every 5 minutes. No spreadsheets to open. No WhatsApp messages to scroll through. Just one screen with everything he needs.

Before & After

What the Owner Said

After the first week of Phase 1 going live, Tunmise shared this feedback:

“It has eradicated the need to spend a lot of time before I could collate my orders. Checking product summary gives me the information needed without stress now.”

“It has helped in getting payment in before the delivery. Customers could follow the SumUp link and make payment directly.”

“The customers love the new innovation.”

What's Next: WhatsApp Bot

Phase 3 is currently in progress: a full WhatsApp customer bot that lets customers place orders, check delivery status, and get payment confirmations — all within WhatsApp. This is the final piece that brings the experience full circle: customers who are already on WhatsApp can order through WhatsApp, but now with structured data flowing through the same automated pipeline.

Could This Work for Your Business?

The specific workflows are tailored to E'Manuel's operation, but the patterns apply to any business that takes orders, processes payments, and delivers products or services. If you are spending hours on manual admin that follows a repeatable pattern, it can probably be automated.

Our free AI readiness audit takes 60 seconds and will tell you exactly which parts of your business are automatable and what the expected ROI would be.

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