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Forward-deployed for operations & supply chain

Fewer surprises between order and delivery.

Our engineers work beside your planners, buyers, and coordinators, building AI for order exceptions, supplier follow-up, shipping documents, and S&OP into the ERP and planning tools they already use, with written limits on what any agent may do alone.

Request an assessmentHow an engagement runs

Where the hours go

  • Exceptions worked by inbox
  • Chasing suppliers
  • S&OP on stale numbers
  • Paper in the middle

What a pod builds

  • Order exception desk
  • Supplier follow-up agent
  • Shipment exception watch
  • Document extraction

What gets measured

  • On-time in-full (OTIF)
  • Order exception resolution time
  • Purchase order acknowledgment rate
  • Expedite and premium freight spend

I / Where the hours go

What we look for first.

  • Exceptions worked by inbox

    Credit holds, short picks, late trucks, and pricing mismatches arrive as emails and spreadsheet flags, and someone works them one by one, often after the customer has called.

  • Chasing suppliers

    Buyers spend hours each week asking suppliers to acknowledge orders and confirm ship dates, and then retyping the answers into the ERP.

  • S&OP on stale numbers

    The demand plan is refreshed monthly from spreadsheet exports, so by the S&OP meeting it already lags open orders, and supply decisions rest on last month’s picture.

  • Paper in the middle

    Bills of lading, packing lists, and certificates of analysis are keyed in by hand, so receiving, quality, and billing all wait on the same desk.

II / What we build

Systems, not slideware.

  • Order exception desk

    Pulls orders stuck on credit holds, pricing mismatches, failed EDI checks, or short allocation into one queue, proposes each fix with the evidence attached, and waits for customer service or the credit team to approve.

  • Supplier follow-up agent

    Asks suppliers to acknowledge purchase orders and confirm ship dates by email or portal, records their answers in the ERP, and escalates any slip beyond your tolerance to the buyer.

  • Shipment exception watch

    Compares carrier and visibility feeds with promised delivery dates, flags loads at risk, and drafts rebooking, consolidation, or customer-notice options. Premium freight still needs a planner’s approval.

  • Document extraction

    Reads bills of lading, packing lists, and certificates of analysis or conformance, checks them against the purchase order and receipt, and holds mismatches or low-confidence fields for a person.

  • Demand signals and S&OP

    Blends orders, shipments, and customer or point-of-sale data into a short-horizon demand view, proposes safety-stock changes for planners to accept, and drafts the monthly S&OP pack from the same numbers.

  • Schedule and capacity checks

    Tests rush orders, line stoppages, and material shortages against capacity and labor, and offers the scheduler ranked options with the trade-offs spelled out. The schedule changes only when they choose.

  • Floor knowledge assistant

    Answers questions from SOPs, work instructions, and equipment manuals (in the languages your crews speak), cites the page it used, and defers to a supervisor on anything touching safety, including lockout/tagout.

  • Spend and supplier analysis

    Classifies spend from your ERP and procurement system, finds off-contract buying and duplicate suppliers, and keeps scorecards of on-time delivery, quality, and price for category managers to act on.

III / A first vintage

Purchase order follow-up

First production deployment, Six to ten weeks

A pod links the follow-up agent to open purchase order lines and the buyers’ shared inbox. Buyers approve every message at first; then routine reminders go out on their own, while slips beyond tolerance still reach a buyer.

Judged by

Purchase order acknowledgment rate, buyer hours spent chasing, and expedite spend, measured against what the Survey found.

An illustration of a first deployment, not a description of a past client.

IV / What we measure

Baselined before we build.

  • On-time in-full (OTIF)
  • Order exception resolution time
  • Purchase order acknowledgment rate
  • Expedite and premium freight spend
  • Demand forecast accuracy and bias
  • Inventory turns and days of supply
  • Documents processed without rekeying

Set during the Survey and reported every season after.

Systems we work inside

Your stack, not ours.

  • SAP S/4HANA
  • SAP Integrated Business Planning
  • Oracle Fusion Cloud SCM
  • NetSuite
  • Microsoft Dynamics 365
  • Kinaxis Maestro
  • o9 Solutions
  • Blue Yonder
  • Manhattan Active WM
  • project44
  • FourKites
  • Coupa
  • SAP Ariba
  • ServiceNow
  • AVEVA PI System

Named for familiarity, not partnership. We integrate with what you already run and recommend new tools only when the work requires them.

V / Guardrails

Where people stay in control.

  • Autonomy, written down

    Each agent has a written charter listing what it may do and what it may only recommend. Recording a confirmed ship date is routine; changing an order, quantity, or carrier above your thresholds waits for a named approver.

  • IT and OT kept apart

    Our agents live in business systems. Nothing we build writes to PLCs, SCADA, or other machine controls, and plant data reaches them only through read-only paths that fit your ISA/IEC 62443 zones and conduits.

  • Supplier terms stay private

    Supplier prices, terms, and quality records stay in your tenant, never appear in a message drafted for a competing supplier, and never become training data.

  • When the data runs out

    If a feed is late or a record is missing, the agent stops, says what it lacks, and hands the case to a person. It never guesses a ship date.

Related

Work that tends to travel with this.

Begin with the Survey.

Two to three weeks inside your team, a fixed fee agreed up front, and a ranked plan you keep whether or not we build it together.

Request an assessmentRead the practice