A new bill of materials, and the round of the portals begins
In front of you is the bill of materials for a new product, three hundred lines, and for each one you need to know whether the part can be found, what it costs today and how long it takes to arrive, so you open the first supplier's portal, search, note it down, then the second, then the third, and by the time you're at line fifty the price you looked at to start with is already an hour old
The work that eats the hours
- Availability to check on the suppliers' portals, one part number at a time, and there are a lot of part numbers
- Orders to split between different suppliers, because nobody has everything, and each one wants things their own way
- Price lists that move, so the price you quoted on last month isn't that price today
- The conversion table between your part numbers and the supplier's, which somebody keeps alive by hand, almost always in an Excel sheet
- Order confirmations that arrive as PDFs, with dates that change, and have to be carried back into the system
- Batches to trace, from goods receipt through to what ships out, tied to the right line
Why a machine fits well here
Checking availability and prices across a hundred part numbers and six suppliers isn't hard, it's long, and it's long in the same way every time, a person gets tired by line fifty, skips a check or reads one figure in place of another, a system going round the screens does at line three hundred what it did at line one
And if the supplier's portal offers no direct integration, no API, the system uses it the way you would, it opens the pages, reads what's written there and fills in, which is exactly the ground of programs with no integrations
Examples of what the system can do
These are examples of jobs the system can do, not jobs already delivered, Muffin Suite started recently and we'd rather write it down
- It takes the bill of materials in Excel, goes round the suppliers' portals with your credentials and hands the file back to you with availability, price and lead time line by line
- It compares the new price list with the one in your system, and flags only the part numbers where the price has moved beyond the threshold you set
- It reads the order confirmation in PDF and checks that quantities, prices and dates are the ones on the order you sent, and where they don't match it stops instead of pushing on, a job for Excel and PDF into the business software
- It uses the mapping table between your part numbers and the suppliers' when it fills things in, and when it meets a part number it doesn't know it leaves the line to you instead of guessing
- It opens the production software and records the goods receipts with batch and quantity, the way an operator at the screen would
What stays in your hands
The choices, which supplier to take when two of them have the part, when to accept a longer date, which alternative is worth it and which isn't, that's the buyer's trade and nobody automates it
The system does the mechanical steps, and when it finds something that doesn't add up, an unknown part number, a price off the scale, a quantity that doesn't match, it doesn't invent it, it stops and sets the case aside for you
How much autonomy to give it is up to you, at the start it's worth keeping it on a short rein, with more confirmations, then you widen it on the cases you have already seen work
Why you come out ahead
The hours that go into the round of the portals today come back free, and they're not just any hours, they're the hours of the person in the company who knows how to buy, the one who should be negotiating with suppliers instead of copying prices from a screen onto a sheet, and if you want an idea of what they weigh you can work out the savings
You don't have to change program, the system uses the production software and the suppliers' portals you already have, and we agree the monthly fee before we start, with no large cost at the rollout
How we start
I'm Antonio Fuccillo, I write the automations myself and I answer the messages myself, so you're talking to the person who does the work
You show me a procedure, a short screen recording is fine, I look at whether it can be done and I tell you the fee before we start, then you approve every addition yourself