AI automation for the manufacturing paperwork that slows your floor down

The floor runs fine; the office is the bottleneck

Walk the shop floor and things move. Walk into the office and you find the real drag: a purchase order arrives as a PDF or an email, and someone re-keys it line by line into the ERP. A supplier confirmation comes back and gets cross-checked by hand. Stock levels live in a spreadsheet that is always a day behind reality. A customer asks where their order is, and three people go digging. None of this is manufacturing. It is administration, and it is where lead times quietly stretch and margins quietly erode.

The instinct is to hire another coordinator or planner, which adds cost and still leaves the work manual. The real issue is that a handful of high-frequency jobs, order entry, supplier follow-up, inventory reconciliation, and document assembly, follow the same rules every time and still get done by hand. That is the shape of work a machine handles best: high volume, clear rules, and a real cost when a run goes wrong, a mis-keyed order, a missed reorder point, a compliance doc that is not ready. We build and run those automations so your planners plan and your quality people improve quality instead of formatting paperwork.

Order processing and supplier coordination, done automatically

Order entry is usually the fastest win. We build a pipeline that reads incoming purchase orders however they arrive, PDF, email, EDI, or portal, and an LLM extracts the line items, quantities, part numbers, and dates, validates them against your catalogue and pricing rules, and writes a clean order straight into your ERP or MRP. Exceptions, an unknown part, a price mismatch, a quantity that breaks a rule, route to a human queue rather than being pushed through wrong. What took a coordinator ten minutes of typing per order becomes seconds, with the original always kept for audit.

On the supply side, we automate the chasing and the reconciliation. Order acknowledgements and delivery notes are matched against open POs automatically, late confirmations trigger a follow-up to the supplier, and inventory is reconciled continuously so your stock figures reflect reality instead of last week. When stock crosses a reorder point, a draft PO is prepared for a buyer to approve. The plumbing follows the job: simple app-to-app moves run on Make or Zapier, anything with branching or real data handling runs on n8n, which we can self-host in the EU. Where your ERP or MRP exposes an API, we integrate directly; where it does not, we bridge with custom code or file exchange. Nothing gets ripped out and replaced.

• Purchase-order intake from PDF, email, EDI, or portal, extracted and written straight into your ERP or MRP
• Automated validation against catalogue, pricing, and quantity rules, with exceptions routed to a human
• Order acknowledgement and delivery-note matching against open POs, with automatic supplier follow-up on late confirmations
• Continuous inventory reconciliation and reorder-point alerts, with draft POs prepared for buyer approval
• Automatic order-status updates to customers, pulled from your live production and shipping data

Quality and compliance documentation, ready before the audit

Quality and compliance paperwork is where a lot of manufacturers lose evenings. Certificates of conformity, material certs, batch records, inspection reports, and the traceability that ISO 9001 or an ISO 13485 environment demands are often assembled by hand from a dozen sources whenever a customer or auditor asks. We automate the assembly: the machine gathers the relevant records for a batch or order, populates the document from your approved template, checks that nothing mandatory is missing, and files it against the right job with full traceability. What used to be a scramble becomes a document that is ready on demand.

The rule stays the same as everywhere we work: the machine prepares and organises, a qualified person approves. We do not automate a pass/fail quality decision or sign off a certificate on your behalf; your quality team owns those calls. What we remove is the collating, the formatting, the cross-referencing, and the chasing of missing signatures, the work that surrounds the judgement rather than the judgement itself. Every run is logged, so your audit trail builds itself as a by-product of the work.

ROI, ownership, and when not to automate

The math here is usually blunt. A coordinator processing 300 orders a month at ten minutes each is 50 hours; automation takes that to a fraction and removes the transcription errors that cause wrong shipments and credit notes. A single mis-keyed order or a missed reorder point can cost far more than the build. We scope to the numbers first, how many orders, how many suppliers, how many documents, what an error costs, and tie our fee to the automation running in production and doing the job. If it does not deliver the result we scoped, you do not pay for it. You own the workflows, logic, and integrations outright, documented, with data kept in the EU where you need it and no lock-in.

We are also clear about where automation stops. A workflow that runs a handful of times a month rarely justifies a machine. Rules that change with every custom job cost more to maintain than to do by hand. Genuine engineering and quality judgement stays with your people. And where a process is genuinely bespoke, a one-off engineered-to-order build, automating the paperwork around it may help while automating the decisions inside it would not. We will tell you which is which before we build, not after.