Semiconductor delay alert, read in seconds

The problem

Since the chip shortage, a delay email is a structural risk, not an anecdote.

- The supplier's delay email lands in one person's inbox, who reads it hours later, when an order is already planned to start with that component. - Without a timely alert, the line gets planned anyway and ends up stopped with no prepared alternative.

• A component delay has been a structural risk for the sector since the semiconductor crisis: microcontrollers, power MOSFETs for the voltage regulator, sensor ASICs. Allocation and lead times can change with a single email.
• That email lands in one person's inbox, who reads it hours later — when an order is already planned to start with that component.
• It arrives in free text, sometimes as a reply buried in a long thread, with the part number written the supplier's way rather than yours.
• Without a timely alert, the line gets planned anyway and ends up stopped with no alternative prepared: no reshuffled sequence, no order pulled ahead that does not need the missing part.

How it fits the IRIS system

Connect in chaotic-sources mode — a dedicated mailbox in silent copy, around the clock.

Connect chaotic-sources mode: a dedicated mailbox in 24/7 silent copy. An LLM extracts the intent (component delay), the entities (supplier, part number, date) and cross-references everything with the ERP to return a concrete action to the production manager.

Nobody changes how suppliers write or how purchasing works. The mailbox just reads in seconds what a person would read in hours, and it hands the production manager an action instead of one more email to interpret. The decision stays human; only the waiting disappears.

See the full IRIS architecture →

Before and after

The supplier email today versus the email read by iLEAN

Aspect	Today	With iLEAN Connect
Time from email to reaction	Hours of human latency	Seconds
Supplier part number vs. your own	Matched from memory	Mapped to the internal part number
ECU or sensor orders that need that chip	Worked out by hand in the ERP	Listed automatically with their start dates
Replanning basis	A late read of the inbox	Real-time order and stock data
Delay buried in a reply thread	Easy to miss	Extracted like any other notice
Discontinuation or last-time-buy notice	Filed and forgotten	Flagged with the products it will affect

Hours of human latency → seconds, with replanning based on real-time data instead of a late read.

Impact estimate

Impact estimate — to be validated with your numbers.

The block below is an estimate to be validated against your plant's actual data. We put it forward so the committee has an order of magnitude; we refine it during the assessment.

• Estimated payback 3-7 months, depending on how often critical supply alerts reach you.
• From hours of human latency to seconds between the supplier's email and a concrete action on the table.
• Replanning based on real-time data: the order that cannot start is swapped before the line is set up for it, not after.
• And fewer line stops with no alternative prepared, which is where a semiconductor delay really costs money in a plant running to OEM call-offs and their delivery windows.

Estimated payback 3-7 months depending on the frequency of critical supply alerts. Estimate to be validated.

And the fair question from the production manager

“What if it takes a routine lead-time update for a real delay?” — extracting intent, supplier, part number and date from a supplier email is an anchored task, and in anchored tasks the best models stay below 1.5% [1] error. And it only proposes: the production manager sees the source email next to the suggested action and decides whether to replan.

^[1] OpenAI paper "Why Language Models Hallucinate", 2025 — on the reliability of AI in anchored tasks.