Foreign trade and distribution
An importer
Eighty suppliers, each with its own arrangement, and the detail of what was agreed buried in the email thread of whoever negotiated it.
The mess
The price agreed with the Shenzhen supplier includes freight to Guayaquil, but that lives in a September email and not in the contract. Nobody wrote down the tariff code the customs broker used last quarter. The spec sheet the customer is asking for exists in three languages and none of the three files says which one is current.
What changes
- One file per supplier holding what was agreed, what was quoted and what went wrong
- Search years of commercial correspondence without opening the mailbox
- Spec sheets and certificates where the person serving the customer can find them, not only the person who requested them
- The agent builds the quote comparison by reading the documents instead of asking again
Where the mess lives
In an importer the critical information arrives by email and stays in the email. The real agreement with a supplier is almost never the signed contract: it is the contract plus twelve messages where the price was adjusted, the incoterm changed, a defective batch was accepted and a credit note was agreed.
When the person who ran that supplier moves to another role, the real agreement goes with them. What is left is the contract, which says less.
The same thing happens downstream. Sales needs the spec sheet and the certificate of origin to answer a customer, and asks logistics internally, who go looking on their own laptop. Two days of delay over a file that already existed.
What changes
One record per supplier, inside the foreign trade folder: the contract, the quotes, the correspondence that matters, the invoices, the certificates, the minutes of the meeting where terms were renegotiated. All in one place and all searchable by content, not by file name.
Search by meaning is what makes the difference here. “Who gave us freight included to port” finds the email that said “CIF Guayaquil”, without anyone having to remember the acronym.
Departments matter because the interests differ. Foreign trade sees purchase costs. Sales sees the spec sheet and the certificate, and does not see the margin. Accounting sees the invoices. The permission tree is the org chart, not a list of shared folders somebody administers in their spare time.
A concrete example
You ask the area’s agent: compare the three quotes for the submersible pump container, tell me which one lands cheapest in the warehouse allowing for freight and the tariff we actually paid last time, and leave me the table in the product record.
The agent reads the three quotes, looks up the customs settlement from the previous shipment to find out what tariff was really paid, builds the comparison table and writes it as a new note in the product folder, with a link to every document it used.
If it needs a calculation that is not trivial, it can run Python to do it, in a container with no network that is destroyed when it finishes. It does not invent the number.
What we will not promise you
We do not connect to your ERP, your billing system or your mailbox. There are no connectors today: documents get in because somebody uploads or drags them, and that is a real limitation rather than a design preference.
We do not track shipments and we do not do certified customs calculation. The arithmetic the agent does runs over the documents you gave it, and it needs the same review you would give a new assistant’s.
One department’s agent does not see another department’s files. That is good for isolation and it is a real restriction: if you want it to compare purchase cost against sale price, those two documents have to sit in the same department or somebody has to share them.
What does the work
The parts that carry it
These are not modules sold separately. Every plan includes all of them; these are the ones that carry most of the weight here.
Other shapes of company
The same mess, elsewhere
The industry and the vocabulary change. The structure of the problem rarely does.
Start free. Pay when it earns it.
Starter credit so you can try it against your own real documentation. No card and no sales call. If it works, you pick a plan.
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