Cahaba Valley Supply
Industrial supply distributor · 60 staff · fictional companyWhat we heard
Most orders arrive by email and PDF, and three people in customer service retype them into the ERP, the system that runs their orders, stock and invoicing. Quotes for non-catalog items wait on one senior salesperson, who is also the only one who knows which suppliers to call. Invoices from about 40 suppliers are checked against purchase orders by hand at month end. A few staff use ChatGPT on personal accounts for emails. Nobody has approved it, and nobody has said not to.
Where AI could help
One thing you can do this week
Ask the senior salesperson to talk through how they price three recent non-catalog quotes, and record it. That recording is the start of a written pricing procedure, and it protects you if they are ever out.
What we don't know yet
- How clean the product data in the ERP is, and whether orders can be entered into it automatically
- How many orders come in as scans or photos rather than PDFs
- Customer contracts that limit where order data may go
The next step
An AI Assessment: three weeks, including two days on site, interviews with sales, customer service and accounts, and a review of the ERP. It ends with a ranked AI Roadmap, the business case for the top three items and a fixed price for each next step.