The problem
Everyday questions had scattered answers. Sales and stock exports from the ERP system, product documents, customer emails and the knowledge in people’s heads each held part of the picture. Which accounts had gone quiet, how one product family was moving across several codes, and what a document said about a product all meant opening several files and asking a colleague.
The discovery
We worked with the team on the tasks they actually did: which exports they ran, what a normal week of questions looked like, and where the answers went wrong. The business rules and exceptions came from that work, not from a specification: equivalent film codes that had to be read together, recent stock receipts that changed the meaning of slow movement, and the difference between a complete export and a filtered one.
What was built and demonstrated
- A business questions agent with a chat interface, chat history and a selector for which datasets an answer should use, configured around company and product knowledge.
- Spreadsheet uploads, including multi-tab Excel workbooks and Excel exports from their ERP, read and reviewed before their figures were trusted.
- Source and data mapping, so an answer names the document, rows or rule it relied on, and stock-code grouping with the team’s sign-off on which codes belong together.
- A website product questions agent for product and application questions on the website, with a route back to a person and capture of the enquiry.
What changed
The change was in method rather than in a number. Outputs were checked against the source reports with the team, corrections were kept as rules, and the agent became a place to ask and check rather than a replacement for judgement. No savings figure is claimed, and no feature is described here that was not demonstrated.
Customer feedback
The internal assistant helped the team check company records and make better-informed decisions using their ERP Excel exports.
Paraphrase of feedback from the commercial team, shared with permission. Not a verbatim quotation. Reference call available on request.
What was not part of it
No live connection to their ERP. The agent worked from Excel exports that the team ran, not from the system directly. A direct connection is scoped separately where the system supports it, as described on the business questions page.