REQ-014 — Pilot: email-order desk automation (cylinders department)

Need (what is being asked)

Run a pilot on one department first before committing to the full 12-month program. Validated on the 2026-07-06 clarification call: the department is the calibration-gas cylinders team (3 people, lead: Fotini) and the flow is —

1. Read customer requests (RFQs) arriving by email (shared Customer Service mailbox, label-assigned) and on ~3 customer procurement platforms.
2. Register the request in SoftOne ERP (Web Services/API stated available).
3. Source by RFQ emails to suppliers — suppliers have no B2B/API; email only — choosing by stock, price, and the vessel’s port time window (2–3 candidate suppliers per port).
4. Quote the customer (SoftOne pricing policy auto-applies; contract entitlements checked manually today — e.g. the MSC contract covering ~1,000 vessels).
5. Follow up to completion: vessel-window tracking, delivery via the port agent, confirmation by signed delivery note or courier AWB.

Context (why — what problem it solves)

~5–10 requests/day, ~1,100 cases per half-year, ~15 communications per case across customer–supplier–agent; the 3-person team is beyond capacity, juggling Outlook + SoftOne + customer platforms by hand; window misses mean 1–2 weeks chasing the vessel’s next port. Each order is effectively a small project. A successful pilot de-risks the wider program, produces a measurable KPI story, and matches the pilot-suitability criteria in the AI use-case pipeline. The same quote-coordination pattern burdens another 10–15 people on other product lines — the pilot’s shape is directly reusable.

Current state (how it is done today)

Fully manual; captured in detail in the interview note (three sub-processes: intake→quote→order, vessel tracking, agent delivery & confirmation). Registration into SoftOne is quick (~1–2 min) and error-free; the cost is in the coordination loop, not data entry.

Success criteria

Client-stated on the call (baseline still to be measured in Phase 1):

• One platform: the team works from a single worklist instead of Outlook + SoftOne + customer platforms.
• Morning clarity: on login, it is obvious what needs doing per case.
• Time-to-close: requests close without delay; measure before vs. after (baseline in discovery week 1 — not measured today).
• Human-in-the-loop: extraction → structured draft; SoftOne posting via API (no re-keying); supplier RFQ emails drafted/sent per agreed autonomy boundaries (no red lines stated on the call — confirm in writing at scoping).

Dependencies / related

• Interview note (2026-07-06) — the validated as-is picture; pilot discovery plan — Phase 1–3 next
• Sample order-email analysis (2026-07-13) — first sample-corpus batch, since fully distilled from the underlying PDFs (four-tier party chain, two independent quote↔order match keys, currency-aware line items); found the hard requirement that email ingestion needs full Graph API attachment access + PDF/OCR extraction (not a search connector) — see REQ-007 below
• REQ-006 — SoftOne ERP integration (Web Services stated available on the call — verify live, Phase 2)
• REQ-007 — M365/Teams integration (shared-mailbox access; IT contact: Evangelia; full nested-attachment access + PDF/OCR extraction required, not just search-connector metadata — 2026-07-13 finding, deepened 2026-07-15)
• REQ-008 — Security & data governance (customer data; sample set of 20–50 order emails being collected — first partial batch (6 emails/5 threads) received 2026-07-13; content since read manually via Outlook web (the automated M365 connector still cannot reach it) — remaining volume + matching SoftOne orders still outstanding)
• Owning department: cylinders team — department profile (the earlier customer-service guess was wrong)
• Supplier B2B system — does not exist; suppliers work by email only (call correction). Customer platforms (~3) replace this dependency: names/access to capture in Phase 2.

History

• 2026-07-06 — captured (source: sponsor debrief after the initial client talk; client willing to proceed, pilot-first). Discovery plan + CEO questionnaire created in the same change.
• 2026-07-06 — validated (source: Fathom-recorded clarification call). Department identified (cylinders, 3 people, champion Fotini); volumes captured; supplier-B2B assumption corrected to email-only RFQs; customer platforms, vessel-window tracking, agent-delivery legs, and manual contract tracking added to scope; client success criteria recorded.
• 2026-07-15 — first sample-corpus batch analyzed (source: sample-order-emails-analysis-2026-07-13.md, 6 emails/5 threads, 8–13 Jul, sent to a TPL relay mailbox prime@tpl.gr per kotsalidis for the whole team to see — reference/design corpus, not live orders). Confirmed pilot champion’s full name/role (Fotini Tsampa, Customer Service, ftsampa@primeltd.com); surfaced consistent subject-line patterns (quote↔order numbering, vessel/port/ETA, vendor tag) as a parsing basis; found a hard technical constraint — order line items live in nested message/rfc822 attachments the M365 search connector cannot expose, so ingestion needs full Graph API attachment access or IMAP (folded into REQ-007 and the M365/SoftOne integration design). Only 6 of the requested 20–50 emails received so far; remaining volume + matching SoftOne orders still outstanding.
• 2026-07-15 — deepened the same analysis by reading the nested PDFs via Outlook web (the M365 connector still can’t do this automatically). Confirms this is Prime Products’ actual order-entry business: a four-tier chain (shipowner/manager → Prime as broker → manufacturer Martek Marine/FastCalGas UK → port delivery agent), with two independent deterministic match keys (base P.O. id suffix A=quote/B=order, and Offer No = Vendor Reference) that cross-validate quote↔order mapping without fuzzy matching, currency-aware line items (EUR and USD both observed), and a full document lifecycle (RFQ → Quoted → Ordered → Acknowledged → Shipped → Delivered → Closed). Surfaced additional Prime-side contacts (Tsatsou, Makris, Apergi) whose department is not yet confirmed as cylinders-team members — see department-cylinders.md.