An excise warehouse: 200 DAS a day, once done by hand.
An excise warehouse for petrochemical products: oils, energy products, denatured alcohols, largely stored and moved on behalf of third parties. Eighteen tanks holding up to 505,000 litres, production and packaging lines, three customs supervision regimes, six excise codes. Four people, two in the office and two in the warehouse.
- from the first meeting to production
- 4 months
- from the first meeting to production
- people: two in the office, two in the warehouse
- 4
- people: two in the office, two in the warehouse
- DAS a day at peak
- ~200
- DAS a day at peak
- old programs still in use
- 0
- old programs still in use
A twenty-year-old ERP, and paper all around it.
The company ran on an ERP installed on site and bought around twenty years ago, split between an operations module and one for excise. Around it: a separate tool for scanning documents, a spreadsheet kept by hand for cash flow, stamped paper registers, and DAS filled in on the system but finished off by hand, with the applicability of the duty written in by hand and the taxable kilos worked out in someone's head.
Orders arrived by email and were re-keyed, with no traceability from order to invoice, and every product had a single code, without the customer's own references.
Two deadlines forced the decision. From January 2027 every paper DAS becomes electronic, and at peak the company handles around 200 a day, while the old system was not ready to transmit them. The owner's aim went beyond compliance: automation, AI and the end of the dependence on the long-standing supplier.
Workstations in the language of the customer's process.
Purchasing and goods-in
Goods received with a tolerance check at the weighbridge, quarantine, and the non-conformity register built into the workstation where the deviation is found.
Production and batch genealogy
Production orders with bill-of-materials explosion and batch-level traceability, from raw material to packaged goods.
Sales through to the shipping document
Private label, third-party and e-commerce flows; bulk printing of DAS on pre-printed forms, picking lists, courier integration.
Stock calculated from movements
The system calculates stock on hand from the history of the movements, so there is no separate table to reconcile.
Customs and excise
The official Combined Nomenclature table, 319 codes, linked to every product and to the licence that covers it.
MCP from day one
The system was born with its own MCP connection, so it can be questioned from Claude and ChatGPT in plain language right away, while the autonomous agents start in the customer's low season, when there is time to correct them calmly.
One thing shown live in the very first demos: an automation that fills in an order by itself in the browser. Possible because the new system is web-based, which the old desktop ERP could never have supported.
From the first meeting to go-live in four months.
Data migration and parallel running with the old system in two phases: first shipping and the finished-goods warehouse, then production, batch traceability and goods-in. The old system has been decommissioned.
- 4 May 2026First requirements meeting
- 13 MayMapping day inside the company
- 29 MayPrice agreed
- 9 JuneMigration plan agreed
- 16 JuneFirst working demo
- June–AugustIterative demos, module-by-module feedback, development completed
- 1 SeptemberGo-live. Data migration and parallel running in two phases, notice given to the old supplier
Three metrics from go-live onwards.
- Time from the physical arrival of the goods to the confirmed goods-in record.
- Non-conformities and quarantine holds caught by the system's checks, per month.
- Time from confirmed sales order to printed shipping document.
This page will be updated with the results, screenshots of the system in production and examples of plain-language queries on anonymised data.
Does your ERP have a deadline too?
A supplier winding down, a rule that changes, an acquisition: these are the moments when a company changes system. Let's talk before it becomes urgent.