Metallic charge receiving: from weighbridge ticket to ERP in one tap

The problem

Traceability is impeccable downstream and wide open upstream.

While somebody types, the truck occupies the dock and the carrier bills demurrage. The usual escape is to type fast, and then the lot ends up badly traced. That comes back weeks later, when a heat lands out of specification and nobody can say which ferroalloy lot it came from. Supplier analysis certificates are the first link in the whole metallurgical traceability chain, and today they are filed on paper or as PDFs in a folder nobody cross-references with the heat that consumed the material. Traceability, impeccable downstream because the customer demands it, is wide open upstream.

• Every truck brings a weighbridge ticket, a multi-line delivery note and an analysis certificate for each lot of scrap, pig iron, FeSi or FeSiMg — and the receiving supervisor signs and then keys it all into the ERP.
• While somebody types, the truck occupies the dock and the carrier bills demurrage by the hour. With several trucks a day, the queue at the barrier is the normal state.
• The escape is to type fast, and then the lot ends up badly traced. It comes back weeks later, when a heat lands out of specification and nobody can say which ferroalloy lot it came from.
• The supplier certificate is the first link of the metallurgical chain, and it sits on paper or as a PDF that nobody cross-references with the heat that consumed the material.

How it fits the IRIS system

Connect in photo mode — ticket, delivery note, certificate and lot label, no supplier changes.

Connect in photo mode applied to receiving documents:

The certificate stops being a filed sheet and becomes linked to the lot from minute one. When that lot is charged into the furnace, the heat inherits its certified chemistry, so an out-of-spec heat can be traced back to its ferroalloy lot in one query instead of a week of phone calls. The supplier changes nothing; the plant photographs what it is already handed. And the truck leaves the dock while the supervisor is still validating the summary, because the barrier no longer waits for the ERP screen. Three levers in one case: licenses, demurrage and the upstream end of the traceability chain.

• It recognizes weighbridge tickets, multi-line delivery notes, analysis certificates and lot labels, with barcodes, QR codes or plain text.
• It extracts supplier, material, lot, weight and certified chemistry, and summarizes it on screen.
• The supervisor validates with one tap and Connect pushes to the ERP via API.
• The lot stays linked, so when the material is charged into the furnace the heat inherits its certified origin.

See the full IRIS architecture →

Before and after

Today's receiving versus captured receiving

Aspect	Today	With iLEAN Connect
Truck at the dock	30-45 minutes	Under 10
Supplier analysis certificate	Filed, unlinked	Tied to the lot from minute one
Lot to heat link	Reconstructed after a problem	Inherited when the charge is made
Traceability upstream	Wide open	Closed from supplier to part
Carrier demurrage	Recurring	Eliminated
Receiving module licenses	Three	One, the supervisor who validates

from 30-45 minutes of dock time per truck to under 10 · from certificates filed without cross-reference to a lot linked to the heat that consumed it · from traceability open upstream to traceability closed from supplier to part · from 3 receiving-module licenses to 1.

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 4-8 months.
• CFO angle: the receiving and warehouse module typically needs three active licenses; with Connect only the supervisor validates: 50-70% reduction, recurring.
• Carrier demurrage — billed by the hour — eliminated, truck after truck.
• And traceability closed upstream, which is what bounds a containment to the heats that actually consumed a suspect lot instead of a month of production.

estimated payback 4 to 8 months. Three levers: a recurring 50-70% saving on receiving/warehouse module licenses, the elimination of carrier demurrage — billed by the hour — and closing traceability upstream. *Estimate to validate*.

And the fair question from the production manager

“Does it read every supplier's certificate and delivery note?” — yes, and without asking any of them to change theirs: the model extracts the table structure with no per-supplier template, and lot labels are read by barcode or QR where present and by optical recognition where not. It is an anchored task, where the best models drop below 1.5% error [1], and the supervisor validates the summary before anything enters the ERP. A certified silicon content outside the grade's range is flagged, not accepted.

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