Industries · Manufacturing
Manufacturing runs on documents — purchase orders, supplier invoices, GRNs, quality certificates, dealer claims — and on an ERP that was configured years ago. The plant is optimised. The paperwork around it is where headcount quietly grows.
The back office scales with volume because the work is still manual. It does not have to.
What this sector loses today
Four patterns that recur across this sector. If two of them are recognisably yours, there is a costed answer — and it is usually smaller than the programme you were being sold.
A cost base that grows with revenue, and a month-end dependent on one person clearing a backlog.
Channel response time nobody measures, and orders placed with whoever answered.
Slow, inconsistent answers to customers and to your own field team.
Decisions made on last month’s numbers because this month’s are inaccessible.
What changes
These are properties of the architecture, true from the day it goes live. We baseline the numbers underneath them before we build, so the delta is measured against your own starting point rather than against an industry average.
Applications
Each of these is a defined build with a number against it, delivered by one of our five services. They can be scoped and bought individually.
Extraction with validation rules against your PO and GRN data, exceptions routed to a person, clean records into SAP, Tally or whatever you run. Costed against the current process before we build it.
The number that moves
Cost per invoice · cycle time · exception rate
Stock availability, order status, pricing, scheme details and claim status, on WhatsApp, reading live from your ERP rather than from a stale export.
The number that moves
Channel response time · calls into the sales desk
Answers from your own manuals, specifications and quality documents with the source cited, for the field team and for customers. Refuses rather than guesses.
The number that moves
Time to answer · escalations to engineering
The pipelines and data layer that everything above depends on. Usually the real project, and usually the part that was skipped.
The number that moves
Data freshness · reports replaced by live answers
We cost the current process first. Where the volume does not justify building, we say so before you fund it — that list is part of what you are paying for.
The number that moves
Hours returned per week · headcount avoided
What we would build first
Doing these in the wrong sequence is the most common reason AI work in this sector stalls. This is the order we would argue for, and the diagnostic is where we test it against your actual numbers.
Volume, time per unit, error rate and rework. Half the automations proposed in this sector do not pay for themselves, and the arithmetic says which half.
Usually accounts payable. Accuracy baseline, exception path, clean write into the ERP, and a number you can hold us to.
The dealer agent, once the integration into your ERP is real and live rather than a nightly export.
Before your risk function signs
In this sector the review is the schedule. We design for these from the first architecture session rather than retrofitting them when the security questionnaire comes back.
Questions we get in this sector
Mostly, and the honest answer is that accuracy varies by document type. That is why we baseline on your real documents before quoting: you get a measured accuracy figure per document class, and an exception path for whatever falls below it. Anyone quoting a single accuracy number without seeing your paperwork is guessing.
Yes, once validation passes. Nothing writes to a financial system on low confidence — those go to a person. The integration is usually the substantial part of the build, not the extraction.
We cost the current process first: volume, minutes per unit, fully loaded cost, error and rework rate. If the model does not clear a sensible payback, we tell you before you fund it. That has happened, and saying so is the point of the diagnostic.
Put a number on it
Four lines. Most people can fill in the first and not the rest, and that gap is usually the whole problem. The blanks are deliberate — they are your numbers, not an industry average we invented. We complete it with you on the call.
We run this before proposing anything. Where the volume does not justify a build, the honest answer is a better form or a deleted step — and that answer is free too.
Free live demo
Including the messy ones — the scans, the photographs, the ones with handwriting. Those are the honest test, and they are the ones we want.
Twenty real documents, including the difficult ones. You see per-field accuracy and exactly what would have gone to a person.
Connected to a copy of your data. Ask it for availability and order status the way a distributor would, on WhatsApp.
Send us a product manual. Ask it the question your field team asks engineering three times a week.
Alongside it: what it costs to run per document at your volume, with the ceiling we would hold it under.
What does the work
Tell us the one thing that is costing you most, and we build it on your own material within 48 hours. Free, yours to keep, and the fastest way to find out whether any of this applies to you.