Replacing manual partner submissions with browser automation

The problem

Most partners accepted sales through an API. This one only had a web portal, so staff re-keyed every order manually. That was slow and error-prone, and it did not scale as volume grew.

My approach

• Chose pragmatism over waiting. Rather than wait for the partner to build an API, we automated their existing portal with Playwright, mimicking the manual steps reliably and at speed.
• Designed for failure. Specified how failed or partial submissions are detected, retried and flagged for a human, so no order is silently lost.
• Treated the partner as a dependency to manage. Production access needed the partner’s IP whitelisting and pre-production checks, so I ran those approvals as a tracked workstream alongside the build.

Outcome

[add outcome, e.g. hours of manual entry removed per week, error rate]

What I learned

The build finished well ahead of go-live; partner approvals set the real timeline. I now start partner-side approvals (access, whitelisting, test environments) on day one of any integration, in parallel with development, instead of after it.