Supply chain: five processes that depend on people today
Planning, purchasing, distribution centers, transportation and fleet. The same pattern shows up in all five: skilled people doing mechanical work between systems that don't talk to each other.
Where it gets stuck today
- The planner downloads files from the planning system, adjusts them in a spreadsheet and uploads them again, every day.
- Critical purchasing reports are built by hand, so they're produced once a week when the process would call for them daily.
- The delivery performance report arrives after the month has closed, which is to say when nothing can be done about it anymore.
What the agents do
There are five, and they work as a single platform because the teams pass context to each other. Purchasing feeds planning, and the distribution centers tie claims to transportation.
Supply release. It orchestrates the full cycle in your planning system, applies the minimum and maximum weight operating constraints, uploads the integration files, coordinates the release across locations and delivers the summary ready for review.
Purchasing reports. It downloads account by account from your suppliers' portals, cross-checks against your ERP and builds the reports that are done by hand today, as often as the process needs and not as often as the team can manage.
Distribution centers and claims. It connects to the warehouse system in real time and consolidates cost, picking times and service level, without the one-day lag. It ties supplier claims to a single source, with alerts for blocked material and unrecovered credit notes.
Transportation performance. It consolidates delivery and tracking sources daily, and warns you when a delivery is about to miss its service commitment, in time to step in.
Fleet fuel efficiency. It cross-checks distance driven against fuel consumed per vehicle, alerts when efficiency falls below target, and opens up access to each regional manager instead of concentrating it in one person.
Systems
Oracle, your ERP, your warehouse system, your tracking and fuel management platforms, and your suppliers' portals.
What's measured
Hours freed up per role, lag eliminated from every report, and out-of-range cases caught before they escalate.