80% Cost Savings: AI-Powered Email Order Processing at INSPIRED Pet Nutrition

Founded in Yorkshire more than 100 years ago, INSPIRED Pet Nutrition, has grown into one of the UK’s leading pet food manufacturers, supplying major retailers and wholesaler partners across the country. But as the company scaled, so did its operational complexity. To keep up with its growing B2B business, INSPIRED Pet Nutrition turned to rb2, a Medusa Expert partner, to streamline its operations.

By building its order management system (OMS) on Medusa, INSPIRED Pet Nutrition unlocked 9x faster order handling and automated the majority of its B2B orders. In turn, they cut operational costs by 80%.

Medusa just allows you to customize and create whatever you want inside the application. I haven’t run into any limitations yet.

Jerre Heijnis

·

Full Stack Developer at rb2

The Challenge: A Mail-Driven B2B Order Flow That Did Not Scale

INSPIRED Pet Nutrition does not run a traditional webshop. Most of its wholesale B2B orders arrive as unstructured emails with PDFs that must be interpreted manually. Each order is then recreated in one of two ERPs, Tropos and I. The dual-ERP setup wasn’t a technical choice: INSPIRED Pet Nutrition had acquired another company, and the acquired business kept its existing ERP. The systems were never consolidated, leaving teams with two disconnected tools and no shared data layer or modern UI, slowing down even the simplest tasks.

The core challenges:

• Unstructured orders: Email-based B2B orders requiring manual reading and translation.
• Two disconnected ERPs: Tropos and IFS running in parallel, each needing separate data entry.
• Fully manual processes: No validations or warnings meant that staff had to manually check every order detail.

The Solution: An AI-Powered OMS Built on Medusa

Solving this required more than a UI fix. INSPIRED Pet Nutrition needed an OMS that could easily connect two ERPs, support their custom workflows, and scale with the business. Medusa's modular architecture allowed them to design all operational flows to fit their exact needs, without starting from a blank slate or rebuilding core commerce logic themselves.

Medusa became the backbone of a new AI-powered OMS that automated the entire flow:

1. A customer sends an order via email with PDFs or spreadsheets, which lands in a shared inbox and is forwarded to a dedicated processing inbox.
2. The email and attachments are stored in a central storage service, which triggers a webhook in Medusa.
3. A Medusa workflow fetches the file and sends the content to an AI model, which parses the unstructured data.
4. The AI returns structured order details, customers, addresses, line items, quantities, which Medusa uses to create a draft order.
5. The team reviews the draft in a custom Medusa Admin dashboard, checks validation warnings, and confirms it for syncing to the correct ERP.

Two core Medusa workflows orchestrate the entire process: one for fetching and preparing emails, and one for generating draft orders. Workflows were a key enabler for the build, allowing rb2 to hook into Medusa’s existing processes where useful and design entirely new workflows where custom behavior was needed. The flexibility to combine built-in steps with custom ones allowed rb2 to model the company’s logic cleanly.

Multi-System Integration Made Simple

A key part of Medusa’s flexibility comes from its custom modules: isolated building blocks that add new domains or integrations without touching the core system. Each module plugs into Medusa’s services and workflows, making it ideal for connecting INSPIRED Pet Nutrition’s two ERPs to the new OMS.

rb2 built dedicated modules for IFS and Tropos, each handling its own sync logic, while Medusa workflows orchestrate when and how data moves between systems:

IFS integration:

• Medusa calls a MuleSoft API, which transforms and forwards requests into IFS.
• This runs as a custom Medusa module, invoked when orders are confirmed or updated.
• Surrounding steps (validation, status mapping, notifications) are handled through Medusa workflows.

Tropos integration:

• Medusa calls Tropos’ API directly over a VPN, and another custom module is triggered on relevant order events.
• Medusa abstracts Tropos’ internal action codes so staff never interact with them.
• Workflows coordinate the process, ensuring visibility and reliable syncing.

Because each ERP connection is its own module, temporary setups, like Tropos’ current VPN-based API, can be restructured later without impacting the rest of the OMS. This modular approach, combined with Medusa workflows handling the orchestration, allowed rb2 to turn two separate systems into a unified, automated backend without heavy middleware or breakable scripts.

Building Without Roadblocks

rb2 extended Medusa with custom modules, workflows, and a tailored Admin UI, all without running into framework limitations. Because Medusa comes with the core commerce building blocks out of the box, the team could focus fully on the custom parts, adding their own branding, logic, and workflows where the project required them.

The team built faster thanks to clear documentation, open access to source code, and an active global community ready to help when questions came up. A developer experience you can only get with open source.

The Medusa docs are great. It’s quite literally one of the best documentation I have read, and that says a lot.

Jerre Heijnis

·

Full Stack Developer at rb2

9x Faster Operations and a Scalable Future

The new OMS had an immediate impact: Order processing is now 9× faster, with ~80% of order emails automatically turned into drafts by AI and staff only confirming the details. A streamlined Medusa Admin removed the need to memorize ERP codes, and built-in validations, entity matching, and duplicate order checks reduced errors. These improvements cut operational costs by 80%, driven by far less manual effort.

The project’s success laid the groundwork for future growth. The company is now planning to connect a third ERP system following another acquisition and to expand its Medusa implementation to include a B2B webstore.

For rb2, their Medusa-based OMS is evolving into a full-scale B2B automation product: proof that with Medusa’s modular architecture, even complex enterprise setups can be rebuilt for speed, flexibility, and scale.