Fraud detection became an important kpi, and sophisticated tools were used to minimize it. The company was shopped and acquired several times, due diligence for the business model would not allow outright fraud like this to survive. I appreciate the cynicism though.
Another example of manual processing done on the warehouse side was manually entering in pricing from the print catalogs, to honor pricing mistakes. Such mistakes cost the company millions of dollars, but I eliminated them by automating print segment pricing (via 4D, AppleScript and Em Software plugins).
An important element of the business which might not be appreciated is that members were segmented, so each cycle several versions of the "monthly" catalog were created, with pricing tailored to the segment ("in commit", "out of commit", etc).