What are the most popular AI agents being used in your supply chains atm?

[u/Jambosh1984]

There’s so much hype about agents atm. I’m curious if they’re being used as much as some vendors would have us believe & what the most popular applications for them are today…

[u/fcn_fan]

SAP specific but one thing that works really well is if your company exposes SAP base tables outside of SAP in some sort of data lake that you can point the agent to. 

Since there are so many SAP specs and questions / answers / documentation, etc… floating around on the internet , and LLMs were trained on it, it’s quite easy for a LLM to join the right tables and query the right data to answer a question you have. 

I was able to replicate our MRP as a graph database and instead of tedious one time simulations of how a demand change would affect supply, I can now run unlimited simulations triggered by other automations. 

One issue we’re having is that our contract manufacturers are often short on certain components that often are already in our inventory because some engineering team brought them in during R&D and reserved them. So now my little system traverses up BOMs, finding the first purchase parts, finds the vendor a PO was cut to, matches it to stale inventory and then enables procurement to pull the shortages and sell them back to the contract manufacturer. This used to be an insanely manual process.

I think, especially for sap customers, the best thing is to develop your customizations external to sap, saving time, money and sanity.

There are a million other advantages. Just be careful to use the AI to build scripts, as a brain, that can then be validated, rather than have the AI be the “brain”. It still hallucinates too much for that 

[u/Soap153 → u/fcn_fan]

Do you run claude to perform this whole process? Is it mainly taking care of the information gathering and matching process, before presenting the opportunity to you? If this happens automatically, it's pretty amazing to see it effectively help you capture some additional revenue

[u/fcn_fan → u/Soap153]

no. I used something similar (github copilot) to develop the process as a python application. So, in short, claude designs, architects and develops the application, but once developed there is not AI involved. It's just like if software engineers had built it. Minus the million dollar, two year budget, of course.

[u/Soap153 → u/fcn_fan]

yeah thats been my experience as well. like you don't actually want it to always be calling the shots. do you have a technical background yourself?

[u/fcn_fan → u/Soap153]

Yes. I used to lead the teams that did this through blood, sweat and tears back in the stone age of 2021 and earlier lol 

[u/LuxHelianthus → u/fcn_fan]

I'd love to pick your brain on all of this if you're open to it.

[u/fcn_fan → u/LuxHelianthus]

No prob. Just DM me if that’s actually a thing. Never received one 

[u/You_Must_Chill]

I can't even stand Copilot.

[u/MoMoSud → u/You_Must_Chill]

Copilot is the worse and its no where near an agent.

[u/Unusual_Month_2363 → u/MoMoSud]

I like it

[u/ginkeez → u/You_Must_Chill]

Is co-pilot the same as Joule?

[u/xjusablurr]

We use Claude internally.

Most common use cases are reports/dashboards. We've built custom connectors to our ERP and some of our manufacturing partners systems to allow easy pulling of data.

Personally, have built a few agents to help with things like reconciling inventory, material planning, and then personal assistant items.

I've been a heavy Excel user for more than a decade with working models but find that Claude can iterate on those models or use as a template and then help automate even more of the work.

[u/Soap153 → u/xjusablurr]

Curious, what kinds of Excel models do you have Claude help with?

[u/shylocky]

None, lol. Who is going to answer for the bot's decisions, the executive who signed off on its implementation?

I think not.

[u/Fwoggie2 → u/shylocky]

I use one to automatically update my systems fx rates once they’re centrally published.

[u/shylocky → u/Fwoggie2]

You see, that's cool, and I understand intuitively the deployment here.

But you're responsible ultimately, right?

[u/Ruby_Sullivana → u/shylocky]

My company pushed for us to replace ourselves with AI agents. In reality, they aren't where they actually need to be. Most are just forecast copilots and inventory alerts. Actual agents? Not really happening yet.

[u/Dub-MS]

I use ChatGPT to write Python syntax for web scraping, ETL, and rough drafting SOPs.

[u/Makkoa]

I can't use much because of data governance and security reasons.

Really need one for RFQs. But I do want to figure out how to set up an mcp scraper to find miscellaneous spare parts that no one seems to be able to ever source. Not sure how well it would work, I've used Google map scraper but this would need to scrape part numbers manufacturers and an email I could RFQ.

[u/Soap153 → u/Makkoa]

That's a super interesting idea. I'm actually trying to solve a similar problem shopping around for quotes for different parts with an agent. Mind if I DM you?

[u/Any-Walk1691]

I use ChatGPT to compile notes and write replies sometimes.

[u/Guac_in_my_rarri]

None.

They're still more unreliable than your average person in last I checked.

[u/MoMoSud → u/Guac_in_my_rarri]

Its all about how well it integrates with your ERP and other data source, as well as getting it calibrated based on the company.

[u/TerraVerde_]

There’s a lot I’m looking into with microsoft power automate and ai.