From delivery note and heat certificate to ERP, by photo

The problem

Heat-to-part traceability starts with someone typing next to a waiting truck.

the carrier waits racking up demurrage while the receiving lead types every delivery-note line; if rushed, heat numbers get mistyped and surface weeks later in an untraceable nonconformity.

• The truck arrives with steel, brass or aluminum bar and the carrier waits while the receiving lead types every delivery-note line into the ERP, bundle by bundle. With several mills, each one uses its own format.
• Demurrage keeps running, so the job gets rushed, and the 3.1 certificate is filed on paper to be dealt with later. Finding it later means searching through binders sorted by date, not by heat.
• In a hurry, a heat number gets one digit wrong, and it only surfaces weeks later as a nonconformity nobody can trace back to the bar it came from. By then the bar has been cut, turned and possibly shipped.
• On a safety part, a heat that cannot be traced to its 3.1 certificate is a finding waiting for the next IATF audit or the next OEM request. And that request usually comes with a deadline measured in hours.

How it fits the IRIS system

Connect photo-to-analog — the supplier's documents, exactly as they come.

Connect's photo-to-analog mode. Vision AI recognizes the delivery note and heat certificate format without asking the supplier to change theirs; one-tap validation on an industrial tablet.

Suppliers are not asked to change a single format. The receiving lead photographs what arrives, confirms with one tap, and the heat is linked to the bar from the first minute instead of whenever someone finds time to type — which, on a busy day, can be never. The bar goes to the rack with its heat already in the system.

See the full IRIS architecture →

Before and after

Receiving by keyboard versus receiving by camera

Aspect	Today	With iLEAN Connect
Carrier at receiving	Waiting, with demurrage	Released in minutes
Heat number entry	Typed under pressure	Read from the certificate
Chemical analysis and grade	Filed on paper	Extracted and linked to the heat
Supplier formats	One more to learn each time	Recognized as they are
Receiving-module seats	Several	Reduced to validation
Heat to turned part	Rebuilt when asked	Complete from receiving

slow receiving with carrier demurrage → minutes. Mistraced heats → complete heat-to-part traceability by photo.

Impact estimate

Impact estimate — to be validated against what receiving costs you.

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 3-8 months, from licenses and demurrage together.
• Typically a 50-70% reduction in receiving/warehouse module licenses, because typing seats become one validator.
• Carrier demurrage eliminated: receiving drops from slow to minutes. The carrier leaves as soon as the photos are confirmed, not when the typing ends.
• And mistraced heats give way to complete heat-to-part traceability by photo, from the bar rack to the laser mark.

CFO angle — typically a 50-70% reduction in receiving/warehouse module licenses plus eliminated carrier demurrage, estimated payback 3-8 months. *Estimate to be validated*.

And the fair question from the production manager

“A wrong heat number on a brake part is serious — can we trust a photo?” — reading fields from a heat certificate with a recognizable layout is an anchored task, where the best models drop below 1.5% error [1]. And the heat number is cross-checked against the delivery note and the purchase order before the receiving lead confirms it, so a mismatch stops receiving instead of entering the ERP.

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