A supervised virtual operator drives the WMS, ERP, and retailer-portal screens. EDI imports, picking dialogs, label printing, customer-portal close-outs. The team watches the live feed from a web console.
A lot of what a 3PL ops team does every day isn't warehouse work. It's screen work. Importing EDI files through retailer portals, printing pick tickets at the right facility, backing cancelled orders out of the ERP, updating ship-via codes, fixing work-order numbers. Hundreds of times a day.
The obvious move is to hire more people. But staff who can navigate a retailer portal and a 90s-era ERP at the same time are hard to find, harder to keep, and the work burns them out. There's no clean API path either. Portals are HTML pages, the ERP is a Windows desktop app from the 90s. Historically the options have been scraping scripts that snap when a button moves, or more hires.
A Windows agent runs on a dedicated VM. It logs into the ERP, navigates the retailer portals, fills out dialogs, prints to the right printers, and reports back. It runs on a schedule, when ops asks it to, or in response to events elsewhere in the system. Its desktop and action log stream live into an Operator Console inside the ops app, so a supervisor can watch and step in if something looks off.
Seven workflows were eating up the team's time: EDI imports, building shipments in OpShip, order printing, cancellations, ship-via updates, WO-number updates, and PDF stamping. We broke each into explicit steps that know what should be on screen, how to check it worked, and what to do if a popup gets in the way. All seven now run the same way, at the same speed, every time — overnight and weekends included.
Automation that runs out of sight makes ops leaders nervous, and they're right to be — you find out something went sideways when the chargeback lands. The agent streams its desktop as an HLS feed into the ops app, with an action log next to it showing the current step, the last one it finished, and what's coming next. Supervisors audit from any browser, no RDP, and one person can watch several sessions at once.
Retailer portals and legacy apps change. A button moves, dialog text shifts, a session expires in some weird way. Traditional UI automation snaps the moment that happens. When a step doesn't see what it expects, the agent hands the screen over to a vision model that reads what's there the way a person would and picks the next move. The exception queue ends up full of actual problems instead of "the button moved."
When automation is touching customer-facing data, you need to point at exactly what happened and when. Every click, every step start, every success or failure gets a timestamp and a session ID. The same log feeds the Operator Console live and the database for after-the-fact review — a full audit trail available to ops, IT, and compliance.
WPF · FlaUI drives the legacy ERP and retailer portals through UI Automation primitives, all on a dedicated Windows VMAzure OpenAI picks up as the vision fallback when a UIA target isn't where the workflow expects itReact · MUI · FFmpeg · SignalR power the Operator Console — an HLS desktop stream alongside the synchronized action logHTTP queue · orchestrator handle job intake from the ops app and dispatch on the agent sideBook a free intro call. Tell us where your team is burning hours on legacy and portal screens, and we'll tell you whether a virtual operator is the right shape of fix.
