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By Ed Hitchcock, Enterprise AI Systems Architect, SupplyTech Solutions Most mid-market distributors we talk to about agentic automation are skipping three layers of work. They want copilots in the C-suite before they have documented processes, before they have a knowledge management system, and before their operational data is structured well enough for a model to reason against it. That gap is where pilots die. We engaged with an agricultural equipment distributor runnin

AI readiness consulting case study: how we documented and costed ~140 workflows for a mid-market building supply distributor before any AI build, recovering 10-15 admin hours/week and exposing the true cost of every recurring process.

By Ed Hitchcock, Enterprise AI Systems Architect, SupplyTech Solutions The Problem We Walked Into A mid-market commercial equipment distributor came to us with a familiar pattern. Three decades of operational knowledge lived in legacy on-prem file shares, departmental OneDrive accounts, individual desktops, email threads, and a small constellation of departmental SharePoint sites that had been spun up without a shared metadata model. Roughly 40% of the documents employees

By Ed Hitchcock, Enterprise AI Systems Architect, SupplyTech Solutions The Operational Layer Was Working. The Analytics Layer Did Not Exist. This is the fourth post in our series on a specialty hardware distributor where we have been redesigning the enterprise AI architecture from the ground up. By the time we started this phase, three earlier rounds had already shipped. We consolidated three logistics channels into one operations platform, rebuilt purchase order automati

By Ed Hitchcock, Enterprise AI Systems Architect, SupplyTech Solutions The financial visibility gap When we walked into this engagement, the specialty hardware distributor had a familiar problem. Operations knew which loads moved yesterday. Finance knew the bank balance. Neither side could answer the question that mattered: what did yesterday cost us, and what did it earn? The ERP, a long-running QuickBooks Enterprise install with custom fields layered on over fifteen ye

By Ed Hitchcock, Enterprise AI Systems Architect, SupplyTech Solutions Most purchase order automation conversations start in the wrong place. They start with the PO itself, with the idea that if you generate the document faster, you have solved the problem. The PO is a trailing artifact. It describes a decision that was already made upstream: which carrier, at what rate, under what terms. If that decision is made manually by someone working a phone and an email inbox, autom

By Ed Hitchcock, Enterprise AI Systems Architect, SupplyTech Solutions Every ERP modernization consulting engagement starts with a question about sequencing. Which problem do you solve first? Our team spent considerable time on that question with a mid-market specialty hardware distributor operating four regional distribution centers and roughly 1,200 commercial accounts. The answer we landed on was not what they expected: consolidate the logistics channels first, and leave

How SupplyTech helped an industrial parts distributor close five critical TMS maturity gaps and build a practical supply chain AI roadmap grounded in structured data.

A mid-market agricultural equipment distributor was scaling fast but couldn't grow its team at the same pace. We built an operational AI layer — departmental AI agents and workflow automations — on top of two years of foundational work. Here's exactly what we built, why the sequence mattered, and what changed.

A mid-market specialty distributor was burning 20 minutes on every purchase order and 11 hours of administrative labor per week. Here is how we rebuilt their intake layer with AI workflow automation.