Every incoming shipment is followed checkpoint by checkpoint, and the right people are told automatically
This refrigerant supplier brings its stock in as imports, and those imports were followed by asking. Someone called or wrote to someone else, waited for an answer, and passed it on. Anyone who needed the same information started by asking the same people again, and by the time it reached planning it was already old.
Each container and truck now has its own record that moves forward checkpoint by checkpoint. Information comes in from the shipping and forwarding companies through integrations, and messages and documents arriving from them are read automatically and matched to the right shipment. The ERP is connected as well, so a shipment is tied to the purchase behind it and the position of a load is known without anyone chasing it.
When a shipment moves, or is late, the people responsible for it are notified and reports go out by email. Everyone sees what their permissions allow. Arrivals are known in advance, and filling and delivery plans no longer wait on a phone call.
Case studies
Stock is live, every past day is on record, and errors are caught as they happen
Filling plants in different cities reported their work through email and messaging groups. Once a week someone read every message, wrote the numbers down, and tried to match them with the ERP. By the time the numbers were ready, they were already a few days old, and a wrong number was usually found long after the gas had moved.
Purchase invoices and returns are read and posted into the ERP by an agent, with the accountant approving
A refrigerant supplier's purchase invoices are not simple documents. Gas, cylinders, freight and deposits sit on the same paper, VAT is not always one rate, imports arrive in dollars or euros, and returned cylinders come back as their own kind of invoice. All of it was typed into the ERP by hand, line by line.
Sales, customer accounts and market position in one place, with the system pointing out what needs attention
Sales information lived in the ERP, in spreadsheets, and in what the sales team remembered. Management could not see which region was weak or how much of a market was actually being reached, and a customer who had stopped ordering gas was often noticed months later.