Where does AI earn its keep in a supply chain?
In the places where people currently reconcile documents by hand: purchase orders against invoices against receipts, supplier correspondence, customs paperwork, and demand signals living in four systems that disagree. The gains come from removing manual matching, not from a better forecast alone.
- Increase revenue
- Improve operational efficiency
- Reduce cost
Supply Chain & Logistics
The unglamorous part is where the money is
Ask a planning team what takes the time and the answer is rarely forecasting. It is reconciliation: matching a purchase order to an invoice to a goods receipt when the quantities differ by two and nobody knows why. Chasing a supplier for a delivery date. Rekeying a customs form because the system that holds the data cannot produce the format the broker needs.
None of that is intellectually hard. All of it is high volume, and all of it is cheap to undo when a machine gets it wrong, which is exactly the profile for a first automation.
What we build
Document matching with exceptions routed to a person rather than resolved automatically. The system handles the clean matches, which are most of them, and a human sees only the discrepancies with the context already assembled.
Supplier correspondence drafted from your own templates and history, including the chase-ups that get skipped when the week is busy. Customs and shipping paperwork prepared and checked before submission, which is where the expensive errors happen.
Demand signals consolidated across systems that disagree. This is usually a data problem wearing an AI costume, and we will say so: if your ERP and your planning system hold different item masters, no model resolves that, and fixing it is the first engagement.
What we measure
Hours per week on manual matching, invoice exception rate and time to clear, and the split of planner time between exceptions and actual planning. On-time in-full and carrying cost move later and more slowly; do not promise them in the first quarter.
Typical projects
- Three-way match between purchase orders, invoices, and goods receipts, with exceptions routed to a human
- Supplier correspondence drafted and triaged, including chase-ups and delivery confirmations
- Customs and shipping documentation prepared and checked before submission
- Demand signal consolidation across ERP, planning, and customer systems that disagree
- Exception handling: the shipments, shortages, and discrepancies that consume planner time
The same work, by industry
How it starts
A three-week assessment scoped to this area: where the hours actually go, what is worth building, and what to fix first. You keep the findings whether or not there is a next part.