Carton Connect
A carton ordering and supply portal for Primark's export carton programme, run by PAC-D.
Visit siteThe problem
Export cartons for Primark move between three kinds of company: the factories that pack garments, the garment suppliers who own the orders, and the packaging suppliers who make the cartons. Those orders were tracked by hand, through email chains and spreadsheets, so nobody saw the same status at the same time and every price was worked out separately.
Carton Connect replaces all of that with one shared record per order.
How an order moves
Every order line follows the same four steps, and everyone with a stake in it sees each step as it happens.
- PlacedThe factory orders cartons by Destination PO, style, pack and size, one line or a 500-row Excel import. Every line is priced on the server as it is entered.
- AcceptedThe packaging supplier accepts or rejects, splits the order into deliveries and sets expected dates.
- DeliveredEach delivery is ticked off with a photo of its delivery challan. Status after acceptance is worked out from the deliveries, so it never drifts.
- CompletedOnce the claim window closes, the order closes itself. Damaged or missing cartons go through an issue with photo or video evidence for Primark or PAC-D to approve.
Six roles, one portal
Each user belongs to one company and sees only that company's orders. Factories never see other factories and suppliers never see other suppliers. The rule is enforced twice, in the application and in the database itself, and tested for every role.
- Factory
- Places orders, raises issues for damaged cartons.
- Garment supplier
- Follows its orders, writes notes, runs reports.
- Packaging supplier
- Accepts orders, schedules and records deliveries.
- Primark
- Oversees every order and decides on issues.
- PAC-D Admin
- Runs the programme: allocations, forecasts, edits.
- Superadmin
- Owns accounts, settings and the audit log.
Reports and oversight
A query builder lets anyone pick from 45 order, delivery and issue fields, add filters and export to Excel, PDF or JSON. Reports build in the background, can be scheduled weekly or monthly, and arrive by email. Primark and PAC-D also get carton supply figures per packaging supplier, on-time rates, factory allocation shares and a carton-volume forecast.
Built to scale
The portal is sized for hundreds of daily users and millions of order lines a year. Before launch it was load-tested against ten million order lines, and the slow paths it found were fixed and re-measured. Factories use it from their phones to upload evidence on the spot.
10M
order lines in the load test
1,600+
automated tests on every change
- Next.js
- React
- TypeScript
- PostgreSQL
- AWS
- Docker
- Infrastructure as code
- Automated tests
Solo, end to end
I did every part of this myself: requirements, product design, the database, the application, testing, cloud infrastructure, deployment and the releases that keep it running. From an approved specification to a live portal took three weeks.
- Early October 2026Requirements and designWorked out the order lifecycle, roles and rules with the programme team and wrote the design specification, approved on 7 October.
- October 2026BuildDatabase, application, emails, reports and the admin tools, with automated tests written alongside every feature.
- 24 October 2026Cloud deploymentInfrastructure defined as code and deployed to AWS, with a one-step release that checks the build before it ships.
- 27 October 2026LiveMoved to its own address, cartonconnect.pac-d.com, then load-tested at ten million order lines and tuned until every page held up.