A large automotive manufacturer's procurement team was fielding hundreds of vendor queries daily. BootLabs built a RAG-powered agent that gives suppliers instant, accurate answers — grounded in live ERP data — without involving procurement staff.
A large automotive manufacturer runs a supply chain spanning 200+ active vendors across components, raw materials, and services. Their procurement team was fielding a relentless volume of routine queries — PO status, payment timelines, tender clarifications, compliance document requirements, invoice disputes, and onboarding questions. With answers scattered across ERP records, SharePoint, PDFs, and email threads, even the internal team spent significant time hunting for information. Vendors had no self-service access at all. BootLabs built a RAG-powered 24/7 vendor support agent that gives suppliers instant, accurate answers grounded in live ERP data and procurement policy — through a secure self-service portal, accessible any time, without touching the procurement team for routine queries.
Procurement managers and coordinators were spending hours daily answering routine vendor questions about PO status, payment schedules, and document requirements — time that should have gone to strategic sourcing. The volume was unsustainable and growing with the supplier base.
Response times for vendor queries varied from hours to days depending on staff availability. Vendors operating across time zones had no way to get answers outside business hours, creating friction in supply relationships and delaying procurement workflows on both sides.
Procurement policy, compliance requirements, and onboarding guides lived in a mix of SharePoint, PDFs, and email threads. Even the internal team often had to hunt for answers — vendors had no access at all, which pushed every policy query back into the procurement team's inbox.
The agent connects to the manufacturer's ERP (SAP) via read-only API to retrieve live PO status, payment run schedules, invoice matching status, and goods receipt confirmations. Vendors get accurate, up-to-the-minute answers — not approximations based on stale exports or manual lookups.
A vector database indexes procurement policy documents, compliance checklists, tender terms, onboarding guides, and SLA frameworks. The agent retrieves the most relevant policy context for each query and generates a grounded, accurate response — with source document citations so vendors can verify the answer.
Vendors authenticate via a dedicated portal using their registered vendor ID. The agent's data access is scoped strictly to that vendor's own POs, invoices, and submissions — no cross-vendor data exposure. A full audit log of every query supports compliance and dispute resolution.
When a query falls outside the agent's confidence threshold — disputes, complex deviations, new relationship queries — it generates a pre-drafted escalation email with full context and routes to the appropriate procurement contact. No cold handoffs, no repeated information gathering.
The agent went live with ERP integration and RAG-indexed procurement documents from day one. Vendors accessing the portal immediately received accurate, cited answers grounded in live data — while the procurement team's query inbox dropped sharply within the first billing cycle. The escalation pathway ensures nothing falls through the gaps: complex queries reach the right human with all the context already assembled.
The procurement team reclaimed significant weekly capacity previously consumed by routine vendor queries — freeing managers and coordinators to focus on strategic sourcing, supplier development, and negotiation.
Vendor satisfaction scores improved — faster, more consistent responses build stronger supplier relationships. Vendors no longer have to wait for business hours or chase procurement contacts for standard information.
Onboarding time for new vendors reduced as the agent handles all standard onboarding queries and document checklists — suppliers can complete requirements independently without waiting for procurement team guidance at each step.
The full audit trail of all vendor-system interactions supports compliance obligations and dispute resolution. Every query, response, and escalation is logged — giving procurement a defensible record of all vendor communications.
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