Case study · Retail and e-commerce · 2026
Pay-as-you-save programme
Saving EGP 15.9M a year for a fast-growing beauty brand
A pay-as-you-save data and AI programme for an Egyptian beauty brand with EGP 109M in annual revenue: a full leakage audit, an AI agent that reconciles storefront, ERP and courier data every day, and EGP 15.9M a year in savings the finance team can check line by line.
- saved a year, 14.6% of the brand's EGP 109M revenue
- EGP 15.9M
- saved a year, 14.6% of the brand's EGP 109M revenue
- online orders a year audited end to end
- 44,000
- online orders a year audited end to end
- gap between gross and net online sales traced to its causes
- 29%
- gap between gross and net online sales traced to its causes
- in orders missing from the ERP, found by the AI agent in its first 48 hours
- EGP 265k
- in orders missing from the ERP, found by the AI agent in its first 48 hours
The starting point
The brand turns over about EGP 109M a year through its own online store, five retail branches and business buyers. Online, about 85% of orders are paid cash on delivery and two-thirds go to Cairo and Giza. Orders flow from the storefront to the ERP and out through two couriers, and the three systems did not agree with each other.
Online discounts had grown from 8.2% of gross sales in 2024 to 19.7%, cancellations and returns removed another 9.2%, and the ledger showed cash differences nobody could explain. The owners could see margin leaking but not where.
What we did
- Fixed the data first. Repaired the storefront-to-ERP sync, added a nightly sync, validate and repair job, and removed 44 duplicate SKUs and 16 duplicate barcodes.
- Put an AI agent on reconciliation. A validation agent built on the Model Context Protocol compares storefront, ERP and courier records every day and writes a plain-language exception report. In its first two days it found 365 orders worth EGP 265,000 that had never reached the ERP.
- Reconciled every cash-on-delivery payment. Courier remittances are matched line by line against the ERP, so cash differences are explained the day they happen.
- Routed deliveries by zone. An address-keyword zoning model sends each order to the cheaper courier for its zone and prints barcoded labels through the courier's API.
- Tightened stock and costing. Redesigned warehouse locations, added barcode scanning, kit bills of materials for bundles and cash controls at the tills. An audit of four high-volume SKUs had found about 189 units unaccounted for.
- Put discounts and marketing on evidence. Discount rules by channel, customer segmentation and basket analysis for bundles, and ad spend checked against verified store orders. One agency reported a return on ad spend of 13.6; verified orders showed 0.40.
Where the EGP 15.9M comes from
Every line below starts from the brand's own order, courier and ledger data, so the finance team can challenge each one. Inputs marked (E) are estimates used to split the total across levers.
| Lever | Baseline | Change | EGP a year | USD a year |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Discount rules, online store | 19.7% of EGP 41.2M gross sales | Down to 12.0% | 3,172,000 | 63,440 |
| Discount rules, branches and B2B | EGP 79.7M of sales | 4.5 points lower (E) | 3,587,000 | 71,740 |
| Cash-on-delivery and cash reconciliation | EGP 3.74M a year of unexplained cash differences | 85% recovered or prevented (E) | 3,175,000 | 63,500 |
| Stock loss and procurement | Cost of goods about EGP 49.1M (E) | Shrinkage 3.5% to 1.0%, supplier and kit costing 3% lower (E) | 2,698,000 | 53,960 |
| Delivery fees and courier routing | EGP 1.49M a year of delivery fees not recovered; 13,459 orders outside Cairo and Giza | 75% of fees recovered (E); half of those orders moved from EGP 120 to EGP 83 | 1,366,000 | 27,320 |
| Marketing spend | About EGP 4.0M a year | 40% with no verified return cut (E), net of margin on lost sales | 1,216,000 | 24,320 |
| Back-office automation | Manual order entry, reconciliation and reporting | Five roles redeployed at EGP 12,000 a month (E) | 720,000 | 14,400 |
| Total | 15,934,000 | 318,680 |
Pay-as-you-save
Vega Data is paid from the savings. We receive the measured savings for the first three years; from the fourth year the brand keeps all of them. If the savings do not appear, we are not paid, so our incentives match the owner's from the first day.
Platform and infrastructure
- Azure Functions
- Run the scheduled sync, validation and reconciliation jobs.
- Application Insights
- Monitors every job run and alerts on failures.
- Azure Virtual Machines
- Host the integration services and the customer-service ticketing system.
- Azure Storage
- Holds data exports and the daily exception reports.
