--- title: "How Multi Ratio cut time-to-online for new products from two weeks to one day" description: "How What's Next built an AI content pipeline that let Multi Ratio remove a three-person bottleneck and list new products the same day they are ready to sell." canonical: "https://www.whatsnext-ai.com/cases/how-multi-ratio-cut-time-to-online-from-two-weeks-to-a-day" published: "2026-08-17T00:00:00.000Z" updated: "2026-08-18T17:45:11.319Z" client: "Multi Ratio" --- # How Multi Ratio cut time-to-online for new products from two weeks to one day How What's Next built an AI content pipeline that let Multi Ratio remove a three-person bottleneck and list new products the same day they are ready to sell. ![Multi Ratio warehouse aisle with blue and orange pallet racking](https://fgzcpjbyiakhjifaciaj.supabase.co/storage/v1/object/public/media/multi-ratio-warehouse-aisle.jpg) ## Overview Multi Ratio is a nearly 75-year-old Dutch specialist in office furniture and warehouse fit-out, with a Magento webshop and around 8,000 products, much of it rotating second-hand and refurbished stock. Every new product needed a full page written by a three-person chain before it could sell, which took one to two weeks. What's Next built an AI content pipeline that automates the product descriptions, USPs, SEO text and metadata, so one person can list a product the day it is ready. ## Details - Industry: Retail Office Furniture - Region: Netherlands - Company size: 25 employees - Timeline: 12 weeks ## Challenge A refurbished desk could sit in Multi Ratio's warehouse for two weeks before a customer could find it online. Not because writing the product page took two weeks, but because writing it depended on three different people, all part-time, all working on different days. Multi Ratio is a nearly 75-year-old Dutch specialist in office furniture and warehouse fit-out, with a Magento webshop and a catalog of around 8,000 products. A large share of that is rotating second-hand and refurbished stock, so new products arrive constantly, and every product needs a complete product page before it can be sold. The process ran as a chain. A product came in, the inventory manager filled out a standardized Excel spec sheet, and the product manager then wrote everything the webshop needed: the description, the USPs, the standard terms, the SEO text and the metadata, in Multi Ratio's tone of voice. On paper that is a few hours of work. In practice it took one to two weeks, because a product's progress depended on three part-time calendars that had to line up. When the timing did not match, a sellable product simply waited. Leadership kept coming back to the same questions: - Why does it take one to two weeks before a product that is physically in the warehouse is online? - Why does listing a single product depend on three people who have to be available one after another? - How do we grow the assortment if speed is set by calendars and not by effort? - What does our rotating second-hand stock cost us while it sits in the warehouse, with no product page and unfindable? That last one is the real cost. For a rotating assortment, a product that is not online is capital standing still in a 7,000 square meter warehouse: bought, refurbished and ready to sell, but findable by no customer. Multi Ratio was missing revenue because of a scheduling problem. ## Approach Multi Ratio came in with the diagnosis already made. They knew the three-person chain was the problem, and that products were waiting on calendars, not on work. What they needed was not a faster version of the same chain. They wanted to know whether the chain could go away entirely. So What's Next started by testing exactly that, instead of building right away. Step 1. Test whether the dependency could genuinely disappear. We followed a real product through the chain to understand why three people were needed at all. The reason was the writing. The description, USPs, terms, SEO and metadata were specialized enough that the work had been split across roles. Remove that work, and the reason for the chain disappears. Step 2. Analyze the Excel input. We took apart the standardized spec sheet the inventory manager was already filling out for every product. It was consistent and structured enough to serve as reliable input for a system. The team was already delivering clean data at the start of the chain, and no one downstream was reusing it. Step 3. Capture the brand voice. Generic text would create extra checking work instead of removing it. So we captured Multi Ratio's tone of voice and brand identity as a reusable specification, so that generated text sounds like Multi Ratio from the very first version. Step 4. Map Magento and the terms logic. We mapped the assortment so the system could recognize an existing product instead of duplicating it, and recorded which standard terms belong to which product types, so they could be found automatically. The discovery phase was not optional. Multi Ratio already knew the chain was slow. The discovery phase proved it could be removed instead of merely optimized, because the clean spec sheet at the start of the process was exactly what made it possible for one person to take over the whole thing. ## Solution What's Next built an AI content pipeline that runs inside a review dashboard and is started from the existing way of working. The inventory manager fills out the same spec sheet as always. One person then uploads it, switches on AI SEO content, and everything the chain used to send back and forth between three desks now happens in one place. The Excel input: the standardized spec sheet is the input. No new fields, no double entry, no new habits. The Magento match: before anything is written, the system checks whether the product already exists in Magento, so it updates the existing listing instead of creating a duplicate. The content generation: in one pass it writes the product description, the USPs, the SEO text and the metadata. The terms finder: it automatically finds and attaches the right standard terms for that product type. The brand-voice layer: every word is generated on the basis of Multi Ratio's captured tone of voice, so the text is on-brand immediately instead of needing another rewrite round. The most important thing this does is not save typing. It removes the dependency. Below is the old chain against the new one. Old way (3 part-timers, in sequence)New way (1 person + AI)People in the chain31Dependent on3 calendars that have to line up across different working daysone person's dayTime-to-online1-2 weekswithin a dayIn the meantimeproduct sits in the warehouse, with no page and unsellableproduct is live on the day it is ready As long as that gap stayed open, the product sat in the warehouse: bought, refurbished, ready to sell, and unfindable. Closing that gap is worth far more than the cents per product it costs to run the pipeline. The labor saving was never the point. The point is the calendar, and the fact that this runs inside Multi Ratio's own Magento, on the basis of their own tone of voice. If What's Next disappeared tomorrow, Multi Ratio would still have a working content engine, not a dead subscription. A human deliberately keeps the last word. The product manager reviews every draft version in the dashboard, regenerates or adjusts it directly, and then places it in Magento and publishes. Refurbished stock differs item by item, so the judgment stays with a person. What has changed is that this one person no longer has to wait for anyone. ## Outcome A new product is now online on the day it is ready, not one to two weeks later, and one person makes that happen. For the warehouse, this means stock earns its place from day one instead of waiting for calendars to line up, and the rotating second-hand assortment, once the slowest to reach the webshop, is now the fastest. For leadership, the speed of the assortment is no longer set by who works on which day, which means Multi Ratio can grow the assortment without rebuilding the three-person relay. From the first conversation about the way of working to a working publication engine in Magento, the project took 12 weeks. Multi Ratio knew on arrival that the chain was the problem. The discovery phase is the reason the build delivered on that: it proved the dependency could be removed entirely instead of merely shortened, and that the existing spec sheet was enough to let one person manage the whole process. ## Results - **14x** faster time-to-online - **1 person** owns the whole process, down from 3 - **8,000+** Magento catalog, now without a listing backlog ## Quote > Our biggest win is that the waiting disappeared. A new product used to depend on three different people and three calendars. Now one person owns the entire process, and a product can go online the moment it is ready to sell. For us that is a real difference. > — Dennis Onk, Director & Marketing (CMO), Multi Ratio