Every hand-off is a place an agent can work.
a day of order entry and exception triage, with a person taking only the exceptions that need judgement.
Supply chain businesses run on hand-offs: orders arriving by email and phone, keyed into an ERP, dispatched, tracked, excepted and invoiced. Each hand-off is a place where work waits for a person, and where a busy period turns into a backlog.
Logistics · Dual-use manufacturing · Transport · Freight and warehousing
What we hear from operators.
Two of the four engagements in our case studies are supply chain businesses. They said the same things.
Orders keyed by hand
Email, phone and portal orders re-typed into the ERP, with the errors found at dispatch or at invoicing.
One person holds the exceptions
Delivery exceptions, short shipments and disputes queue behind the one coordinator who knows the customers.
Quoting takes days
Product history sits across spreadsheets, an ageing ERP and the heads of two senior estimators.
Compliance paper
Chain of Responsibility records, dangerous goods declarations, customs entries and export permits assembled by hand under time pressure.
First use cases, with the number we scope to.
Each is scoped in the free audit with a target, a named owner and a human review point. The targets are what we set; the audit puts your own number on them.
Order entry
Orders read from email, phone transcripts and the portal, validated against the catalogue and written to the ERP, with the doubtful ones queued for a person. The distributor in our case studies runs this around the clock.
Exception triage
Delivery exceptions classified, the routine ones resolved against your rules, the rest escalated with the history attached. Nobody's leave breaks the queue.
Quoting
Quotes drafted from product history, pricing rules and the ERP for estimators to review rather than build. The manufacturer in our case studies went live six weeks after the audit.
The rules that apply.
Freight, customs and defence-related manufacturing each bring their own obligations. This is what we check each use case against. It is not legal advice; it is the list your compliance manager will ask about.
- 01Heavy Vehicle National Law, Chain of Responsibility. Every party in the chain shares duty for load, speed, fatigue and mass. An agent that schedules or dispatches must work inside those limits and keep the record.
- 02Customs Act and Australian Border Force requirements. Import and export declarations, tariff classification and record-keeping, with a licensed broker or a person accountable for lodgement.
- 03Australian Dangerous Goods Code. Classification, documentation and segregation for dangerous goods, where a drafted declaration must be checked by a trained person.
- 04Defence Trade Controls Act and the Defence and Strategic Goods List. For dual-use manufacturers, what may be supplied, published or brokered, and to whom. Export permits are a human decision with an agent doing the paperwork.
- 05Privacy Act 1988 and the WHS Act. Customer and driver data, and the safety duties that apply to any system that influences how work is scheduled on a site.
Guardrails that matter most here
- 05Human in control: explicit boundaries for what an agent completes, queues or escalates.
- 04Tested and watched: order accuracy measured every week, not assumed.
- 09On the record: every action logged, so a Chain of Responsibility or customs audit has an answer.
How it ran at a 60-person distributor.
Orders arrived by email, phone and a web portal, were keyed into the ERP by hand, and delivery exceptions queued behind one experienced coordinator. Every busy period created a backlog that took weeks to clear.
The audit flagged the process pillar: the workflow had to be mapped and cleaned before it could be automated. Then Adam, the AI operations agent, on order entry and delivery-exception triage, wired to the ERP with clear rules for what escalates to a person.
Order entry around the clock, the standing backlog cleared and staying cleared, exception triage no longer dependent on one person, and payment tied to tasks completed and verified. Read the full case, and the manufacturer's quoting agent.
Questions.
Our ERP is old. Can an agent still work with it?
Usually yes. The Digital Brain connects through whatever the ERP exposes: an API, a database view, a file drop or, at worst, the same screens your staff use. The audit tells you which before anything is promised.
What happens when the agent is not sure about an order?
It queues it for a person with the reason attached. The boundaries for what it completes on its own, what it queues and what it escalates are written down before it goes live, and reviewed against the record every week.
How is it paid?
Per task completed and verified, after a free trial on one mapped workflow. No licence fee. See pricing.
Where do we start?
With the free audit: a readiness scorecard, your three highest-return use cases with a number on each, and a 90-day roadmap. Three hours of your time.
Our data is a mess across ERP, spreadsheets and email. Is AI even possible?
That mess is normal, and it is exactly what the audit maps. Automation starts on the workflow with the cleanest payback while the data plan fixes what blocks the rest. Waiting for perfect data means waiting forever.
What does this mean for our ops team?
The keying and chasing goes to the agents. The exceptions, relationships and judgement stay with your people, who finally have time for them. In our distribution engagements the ops team ends up running the agents, not competing with them.