01 / Operations — Flagship Case Study

Automating a warehouse, end to end.

The Tao of Tea · Portland, OR · 2025 — Present

When I joined The Tao of Tea — a specialty tea manufacturer and wholesaler in Portland — order fulfillment ran the way it does at most small manufacturers: manually. Purchase orders arrived as PDFs in a dozen formats. Staff retyped them into spreadsheets, hand-calculated what to pick, guessed at how to pack cartons, and wrote labels one at a time. Every step worked — and every step leaked time, invited errors, and depended on one person's memory.

Nobody asked me to fix it. I just couldn't stop seeing it as one system with five broken links. So I built the systems that now run it daily — used by non-technical warehouse staff, fully offline, designed to outlast me.

The Operating Flow
The Systems
SYS.01 / Demand PO Aggregator
Rust
Problem
Orders arrived from Amazon, iHerb, and wholesale channels in completely different formats. Understanding total demand — how much of each tea to produce — meant manually consolidating everything: a slow, error-prone ritual.
Built
A tool that ingests purchase orders across channels and aggregates them into a single demand picture, so production planning starts from one reliable number instead of five spreadsheets.
SYS.02 / Fulfillment PO Processing & Carton Optimization
Tauri · React · TypeScript · Rust
Problem
Every retailer formats POs differently — and turning a PO into warehouse action meant manually working out what to pick, which retailer SKU maps to which internal product (the same tea exists as a tin, a pound bag, and an Amazon "Pack of 2"), and how to pack cases into cartons without exceeding weight limits.
Built
A fully offline desktop app with rule-based PDF parsers tuned to each retailer's layout, plus a standardized Excel intake for everyone else. It cross-references every line against an editable product master database — resolving SKUs, Amazon pack variants, and case specs — then runs a constrained packing algorithm that maximizes carton utilization under a strict weight ceiling. Output: a print-ready pick list and a carton-by-carton packing map.
Principle
Nothing hardcoded. The product master is an Excel file staff can edit — new products, new pack variants, zero code changes.
SYS.03 / Labeling Product Case Label Printer
Python
Problem
Cases were labeled by hand — and a mislabeled case means the wrong product shipping to a customer, the most expensive error a wholesaler can make.
Built
A label-printing application generating accurate, standardized case labels directly from product data.
Impact
Wrong shipments reduced to near zero.
SYS.04 / Receiving Incoming Shipment Label Generator
Tauri · Rust · React · Deployed to warehouse thermal printers
Problem
Receiving inventory meant hand-writing labels for incoming shipments — slow, inconsistent, unscalable.
Built
A desktop application deployed directly to the warehouse's thermal printers, generating standardized incoming-shipment labels on demand — used by floor staff daily.
SYS.05 / Documentation Packing Slip Generator
Python
Problem
Every outgoing order needed a packing slip assembled manually from order data — repetitive, time-consuming, inconsistent.
Built
A tool that generates complete, accurate packing slips automatically. Manual iHerb order processing: eliminated.
The Backbone
SYS.06 / Master Data Tao Catalog & Inventory System
Rust · axum · PostgreSQL · Tauri
Problem
A shared spreadsheet tracked every product and had become load-bearing and fragile — one bad paste could silently corrupt inventory for everyone, with no record of who changed what.
Built
A cloud inventory system replacing it. A Rust/axum API is the single gatekeeper to the database — nothing writes directly. PostgreSQL constraints enforce integrity at the storage layer rather than trusting the caller, and a Tauri desktop app gives non-technical staff a familiar interface over all of it.
Read the case study →
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