Retail
·Singapore·2.5+ years (ongoing)Autonomous Operations for a National Furniture Retailer
Deployed end-to-end autonomous operations across five business functions — HR, procurement, customer service, accounts, and marketing — for a national furniture retailer with multiple showrooms. This is Reluvate's longest and deepest client engagement, running continuously for over 2.5 years with expanding scope.
5
Business functions automated
2.5+
Years of continuous engagement
Real-time
Commission calculation (was days)
Challenge
This national furniture retailer operated across multiple large-format showrooms with a complex operational model: high-value, consultative sales requiring skilled staff, delivery logistics for bulky items, multi-step procurement from international suppliers, and a commission structure that accounted for scenarios like multi-salesperson deals, product swaps, callbacks, and returns. Every one of these processes was managed through a combination of legacy ERP (ACCPAC), spreadsheets, and institutional knowledge held by long-tenured staff. The pain was felt across every department. HR spent days each month on payroll calculations that had to account for complex commission tiers. Procurement teams manually created purchase orders, tracked supplier shipments, and processed warranty claims through email chains. Customer service operated as a cost center that scaled linearly with store count — every new showroom needed more staff to handle delivery inquiries, product questions, and complaint resolution. The accounts department reconciled sales data from POS against ERP entries by hand, a process that was both slow and error-prone. The retailer had tried piecemeal automation before — a chatbot here, a workflow tool there — but none of these point solutions addressed the fundamental problem: the work between systems was still manual. Data entered in the POS needed to be re-entered in the ERP. Commission calculations required pulling data from three different systems. Marketing campaigns were planned based on gut feel rather than customer analytics because consolidating the data was too time-consuming.
Approach
Reluvate deployed TeamCraft — its multi-agent operational automation platform — across all five business functions in a phased rollout over the first 12 months, with continuous expansion since. The approach was function-by-function: starting with customer service (highest immediate ROI and lowest disruption risk), then procurement, accounts, HR, and finally marketing. For customer service, Reluvate built multi-channel AI agents handling WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and web chat. These agents were trained on the retailer's full product catalogue, delivery policies, and complaint resolution procedures. They handle product inquiries, delivery tracking, appointment scheduling, and first-level complaint resolution autonomously, escalating to human agents only for complex disputes or high-value customer recovery scenarios. For procurement, TeamCraft agents now generate purchase orders based on sales velocity and inventory thresholds, track supplier shipments, process warranty and damage claims with photographic evidence (using computer vision for damage assessment), and manage supplier payment schedules. The accounts module automates commission calculations — handling the retailer's uniquely complex scenarios including multi-salesperson attribution, product swaps post-sale, callback commissions, and return clawbacks. The HR module manages payroll preparation, leave tracking, and onboarding workflows. The marketing module analyses customer purchase history and showroom traffic patterns to generate targeted campaign recommendations.
Design Notes
Integration with ACCPAC ERP was the single largest design challenge. ACCPAC's API surface is limited and inconsistent, so Reluvate built a middleware layer that interfaces with ACCPAC through a combination of API calls, database-level read operations (for reporting), and file-based imports (for batch transactions). This middleware provides a clean abstraction layer that the TeamCraft agents interact with, insulating them from ACCPAC's idiosyncrasies. Change management was handled through a shadow-mode approach for each function. When a new TeamCraft module went live, it ran alongside the existing manual process for 4-6 weeks. Staff performed their work as usual while TeamCraft independently processed the same transactions. Discrepancies were reviewed daily, and the AI's logic was refined until its outputs matched or exceeded the accuracy of the manual process. This approach was essential for building trust with long-tenured staff who were understandably skeptical of automation. Exception handling is pervasive in retail operations — edge cases are the norm, not the exception. Rather than trying to automate every scenario from day one, Reluvate designed a graduated autonomy model. Common, well-defined transactions are fully autonomous. Uncommon but rules-based scenarios are handled with automated execution and post-facto human review. Genuinely novel situations are routed to human operators with full context and a recommended action. Over 2.5 years, the percentage of transactions handled fully autonomously has steadily increased as the system encounters and learns from more edge cases.
Result
All five business functions now operate with AI agents handling the majority of routine transactions. Operations staff have been redeployed from data entry and process execution roles to customer-facing, revenue-generating positions. Commission calculation — previously a multi-day process requiring a dedicated team — now runs in real-time. Customer service response times dropped from hours to seconds for standard inquiries. The engagement continues to expand, with new automation modules being added as the business identifies additional opportunities.
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