Every order is a promise. Most of the work is checking whether you can keep it.
A distributor’s margin lives in the gap between the order that was placed and the one that was shipped: the wrong price list applied, the promised date nobody checked against stock, the DDT typed twice, the customs line that held a pallet for a week, the invoice that matched nothing. None of that needs judgement. It needs someone to check, and the people checking are the ones customers call. Put an agent on the checking. Keep the people on the customer.
- Built on top of your gestionale and warehouse system, through their interfaces
- Five of the six queues below are rules: price lists, stock, documents, ageing, matching
- A person signs the exceptions, not the routine
Put an agent on the queue, not on the org chart.
Each role owns one recurring queue. It drafts, it shows its evidence, and a named person signs before anything consequential moves. The last column is the sector’s AI Boundary Map: whether the step is mostly a rule, mostly a model, or stays with a person.
| Role | What it drafts | Who signs | What it reads | Mostly |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Order entry from any channel | The order in the gestionale from email, PDF, portal or agent app, every line matched to an item code and the customer’s conditions applied. | Customer service, on unmatched lines and new customers. | The shared inbox, the item master, customer conditions. | a model |
| Availability and promised date | The order confirmation with a promised date computed from stock, open purchase orders and supplier lead times, and partial shipments proposed where a line cannot be met. | Nobody below the threshold you set; sales above it. | Stock, open purchase orders, the supplier register. | code and rules |
| Price and condition check | Each order line validated against the customer’s price list, discounts and payment terms, with every deviation and its margin effect listed. | The sales manager, on deviations only. | Price lists, customer conditions, the CRM. | code and rules |
| Shipping and customs documents | The DDT, packing list and, for cross-border orders, the customs data set with HS codes and origin, from the confirmed order and the picking list. | Logistics, before the carrier is booked. | The confirmed order, the item master, the carrier portal. | code and rules |
| Dunning and collections | Reminders by ageing bucket and customer history, with disputed invoices held back and the credit position summarised before the next order is released. | Credit control. | The ledger, the SDI invoices, the CRM. | code and rules |
| Supplier invoice matching | The match between purchase order, goods receipt and supplier invoice, with exceptions grouped by cause. | Accounts payable, on the exceptions. | Purchase orders, receipts, SDI invoices. | code and rules |
How much of this is actually AI.
This is the sector with the lowest determinism ratio we expect to find: five of six queues are rules over data the gestionale already holds. Only order entry has to read documents written by someone else, and even there the item match is a lookup once the text is out. A distributor that buys an AI platform for this is paying model prices for arithmetic. The AI Boundary Map exists to say so before the build, not after.
5 / 6 queues mostly rules · 1 / 6 with a model
No client names. Real patterns.
Every engagement produces the same five documents, whatever the sector. What we can show is anonymised: the pattern, the number, and where it applies.
When the choice is between a platform licence and one senior automation specialist, the specialist typically returns 5–10x, because they find the three workflows worth automating instead of automating the demo (SUPALABS engagement data, 2024–2026).
Related case studies
Three tiers, set per task type, and you set the thresholds.
Every automated task runs at one of three levels of authority. The tier is set per task type rather than per system, so the same workflow can draft one step, wait for approval on another, and act alone on a third. A task moves up only when the evaluation suite shows the pass rate you defined as the threshold, and it moves back down the moment the monthly report shows a regression.
Nothing is promoted on our say-so. The thresholds are yours, the report that tests them is a named line item, and the decision log shows every action that was taken at every tier.
The full method: five artifacts, three tiers, four rungs →Four rungs. You can stop after any of them.
The problems, one at a time.
Frequently asked questions
The same method, other queues.
Thirty minutes to find out whether there is anything worth mapping.
The call is free, and we will tell you if the answer is no. Bring one queue that costs someone an evening a week.