Until recently, processing online orders from FloorandDecor.com was an extremely manual process.

When a shopper purchased an order online at the flooring materials retailer, a call center employee would see the order come in on his screen and swivel his chair to a new screen to figure out, based on the customer’s shipping address, which of Floor and Decor’s three distribution centers or 84 stores should fulfill the online order, Annie Barua, senior director of omni solutions and supply chain IT, told attendees at the Manhattan Momentum conference in Florida this week. Google Maps was often involved.

After the customer service employee figured out the best store, he would have to look up the store inventory or call the store to see if it could fulfill the order. Once the employee found the best store, he would enter the order into the retailer’s store ordering system, and the call center employee would then call the customer to let her know the shipping cost and when to expect the order, Barua said. Cost of shipping is variable for Floor and Decor orders, as the retailer’s stone, tile and wood products are often heavy—as much as thousands of pounds—and stores have different last-mile contracts.

Because this process was extremely inefficient, the retailer decided to automate this process with supply chain commerce vendor Manhattan Associates Inc.’s order management system.

“The objective was to retire swivel chairs,” Barua said.

It took about nine months for Floor and Decor to integrate all of its backend systems into the order management system, including its supply chain system, warehouse management system, store point-of-sale system, marketing and e-commerce cloud, ERP system and inventory management system. The new order management system launched in July 2017.

Now, with the new system, when a shopper makes a purchase on FloorandDecor.com, the retailer’s backend system can automatically figure out which store location should fulfill the order by factoring in proximity to the shopper, SKU-store assortment status and immediately give the shopper an estimate of the shipping cost. This also allows online shoppers to see store-specific inventory while shopping online.

Connecting all these systems enables Floor and Decor to reallocate those call center employees that were having to manually handle e-commerce orders, to now focus on other customer service tasks, such as handling “where’s my order?” inquiries, Barua said.

The new system also resulted in the average shipping cost for customers decreasing 30%, Barua said. Now, the order manage system factors in Floor and Decor’s negotiated rates that it has with its shipping carriers, whereas call center employees were not always tapping into this information.

Barua declined to specific any sales gains or reduction in costs.

Floor and Decor sells hard flooring materials such as tile, wood, stone and laminates. It has more than 7,000 SKUs and its customers are both everyday consumers who are conducting do-it-yourself projects and professionals, such as contractors, who are using the materials for their job.

Barua is not sure what the breakdown is for sales between consumers and professionals, as professionals may contribute more of a dollar amount to sales, but there may be more overall everyday consumers making smaller purchases. Plus, many professionals come to its stores for its design services and make many large orders, whereas online shoppers do not identify themselves as a professional or not. These are metrics Floor and Decor would eventually like to track, Barua told Internet Retailer at the conference. Barua declined to say which percent of sales are e-commerce.