Logistics software Galicia: 3 real cases of SMEs with their own warehouse

In Galicia there are hundreds of SMEs with an industrial unit or warehouse still operating with spreadsheets, paper delivery notes and phone calls to coordinate orders and routes. It’s not neglect — it’s because the solutions on the market are either too expensive (SAP, enterprise WMS) or too generic to fit how they actually work.

Well-targeted logistics software Galicia isn’t an enterprise WMS. It’s about solving the 3 or 4 concrete bottlenecks that consume time and generate errors every day. These three cases show what can be automated first and which order gives the best ROI.

Case 1 · Technical rescue: a broken website and an oversized stack

The main pain point for an SME with a warehouse isn’t always its internal logistics software. Sometimes it’s a tool that should work and doesn’t, with a supplier who has stopped providing service.

A Galician natural stone distributor with its own warehouse came to us with exactly this problem. Their website loaded fast, but was broken at critical points. When they asked the company that had built it for fixes, they got no response. To make matters worse, the tech stack it had originally been built with was well beyond what they actually needed: unnecessary complexity, expensive maintenance, hard for another team to evolve.

What was done:

• Technical redesign of the website while keeping the existing visual identity (the client was happy with the design).
• Reduced the stack to what’s actually needed: fewer dependencies, fewer points of failure, lower operating cost.
• Expanded scope and notable improvements in speed and maintainability compared with the previous version.

What changed for the business: they regained control of their most visible tool. The website works, they can evolve it without depending on a third party that wasn’t responding, and the stack is proportional to the company’s actual size.

The general lesson: before investing in a WMS or digitising more processes, check whether your current infrastructure is actually serving you. An unresponsive supplier or an oversized stack are more urgent and more expensive problems than the pain you originally set out to fix.

Case 2 · Order intake via WhatsApp and voice

A distribution company with a warehouse received orders from its regular customers through three channels: phone, WhatsApp (text + voice notes) and email. The process was: someone on the team listened to / read each message and transcribed the order into the internal system. Frequent errors: misidentified products, mistyped quantities, orders left unread and unprocessed.

The real problem: two people spent 3-4 hours a day just transcribing orders. During seasonal peaks (Monday mornings), Saturday’s orders were processed on Tuesday.

What was automated:

• A receiver connected to the company’s WhatsApp Business.
• Voice notes are automatically transcribed. The text is parsed against the known product catalogue (matching tolerant of typos and industry-typical synonyms).
• A structured draft order is generated (customer, products, quantities, expected delivery date) that the operator only validates or corrects.
• Automatic confirmation email to the customer with the summary before the order is entered into the ERP.

Measured result: time per order dropped from 4 minutes (transcription + validation) to 45 seconds (validation only). Transcription errors went from ~8% to <1%. Weekend orders are processed before 10:00 on Monday.

Case 3 · Delivery route optimisation with real cost per kilometre

An SME with a mixed fleet of vans (large Sprinters + small vans like the Kangoo) planned daily routes “by eye” with paper and a mental map. The result was that the Sprinters sometimes ran short routes with little load while the small vans sat parked when there were long routes they could have covered better.

The real problem: without visibility of the real cost per kilometre per vehicle, allocation decisions were intuitive. Nobody had run the numbers because everyone kept them in their head.

What was automated:

• A planning panel that assigns orders to vehicles optimising total cost (fuel, kilometres, load compatibility).
• Each driver receives their route sheet on their phone with the optimised delivery order.
• At the end of the day, an automatic report: actual km vs planned km, total cost, incidents.

Result measured after 3 months: 11% fewer total kilometres driven with the same delivery volume. Notable monthly savings in fuel and driver time.

The two routes to get there

The three cases above show the what: the capabilities that genuinely ease the day-to-day of an SME with a warehouse. The how to get there has two paths:

• Patch on top of the current ERP: the automations are built as external pieces that integrate with the existing ERP. It works, it’s quicker to implement, and it avoids the cost of migrating. In exchange, it builds up technical debt: every patch has to be maintained, every ERP update threatens to break it, and if the ERP supplier changes terms you can’t move.
• Migration to a modern ERP built for SMEs with logistics operations: the same capabilities but natively integrated — real-time stock, multichannel order intake, route planning, automatic reporting, all from day one. A bigger investment up front, but without the accumulated cost of maintaining several patches.

The compound effect: why three modules together are worth more than three separately

Here’s the point almost nobody explains when selling: each of the three cases above, on its own, already delivers value. But the real value appears when they live in the same system and share data in real time. It’s not a 30% + 30% + 30% improvement. It’s much more:

• The WhatsApp order receiver, if it has live access to stock, can automatically reject or adjust impossible orders before they’re committed to with the customer.
• The route planner, if it has visibility of the day’s order status and stock, can replan van loads without calls to the warehouse when a product is out of stock.
• The location and picking system, if it knows which routes go out tomorrow, can prepare orders in the optimal loading order, not the order they came in.

None of this works if the three pieces are separate patches connected by fragile APIs. It works when they’re modules of the same ERP, sharing the same data model, genuinely in real time.

That’s why an SME that activates the five modules of an integrated ERP doesn’t save five times what it would save with just one — it saves a lot more, because each module multiplies the value of the others. And the reverse is also true: whoever sticks with two patches on an old ERP never reaches that effect, however well the individual patches work.

In the short term, patches ease the workload almost immediately. In the long term, an ERP that integrates everything natively isn’t just cheaper to maintain — it unlocks a kind of operational efficiency that standalone patches can’t produce.

Where to start in your SME

If you have a warehouse in Galicia and recognise yourself in any of these cases, the initial audit is always the same: shadow an average worker for half a day, time how long each repetitive task takes, and calculate how many times a month it repeats. The automations that make sense stand out immediately — they’re the ones that save 10+ hours/month or eliminate costly errors.

At Rowan Tech we do that diagnosis for free. We put concrete numbers on the bottlenecks before proposing anything. From the diagnosis, we lay out the two routes — patching your current ERP or migrating to our ERP for SMEs with logistics operations, designed from day one with these capabilities built in — and explain which fits your horizon better. If you decide afterwards not to do it with us, you’re left with a clear map of where any improvement should go. Let’s talk.