Raw-material delay alerts, rescheduled in time

The problem

The email that decides the afternoon lands in an inbox nobody is watching.

critical supplier alerts land by email with specific people who can't watch the inbox in real time; by the time they're read, lathe scheduling is already broken.

• Mid-morning the steel or brass supplier writes: the ground bar due this afternoon slips two days, or arrives in a different diameter than ordered.
• The message goes to a buyer who is in a meeting, while several lathes are already scheduled to run that heat and that diameter as soon as the current lot finishes.
• By the time someone reads it, the lathe has been set up for a bar that is not coming, and the changeover time is already lost twice: once to set up, once to undo.
• Nobody ignored anything: the channel was simply never designed for the speed of a bar turning schedule, where a lathe can finish a lot in a couple of hours.

How it fits the IRIS system

Connect in chaotic-sources mode — a dedicated mailbox in silent copy, 24/7 in bar turning.

Connect's chaotic-sources mode — a dedicated mailbox in silent copy 24/7. A model extracts intent (supply delay) and entities (supplier, heat number, diameter, date), cross-references the ERP, and returns the concrete action to the right role.

The supplier does not change how they write, and the buyer does not change how they work. What changes is that the notice is read and crossed with the lathe schedule in seconds, and the right person gets an action — which lathe to swap to which order — not just another email to interpret. Over a few months it also builds a record of which suppliers slip and how often.

See the full IRIS architecture →

Before and after

The delay in an inbox versus the delay on the lathe plan

Aspect	Today	With iLEAN Connect
Time to read the notice	Hours	Seconds
What gets extracted	Whatever the reader notices	Supplier, heat, diameter, new date
Lathes affected	Worked out by hand	Listed from active work orders
Changeover for missing bar	Already done, then undone	Avoided
Who acts	Whoever opens the email	The role that owns the reschedule
Record of the event	Buried in a mailbox	Stored with context for traceability

hours of human latency → seconds. Lathe rescheduling based on real-time data instead of hours-old reading.

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 supply alerts arrive.
• Idle lathes caused by poor information flow stop happening, and so do changeovers that have to be undone.
• Human latency goes from hours to seconds, regardless of who is in a meeting or on leave.
• And the reschedule is based on real-time data, not on an email read after lunch, with the event stored for the next supplier review.

avoided idle lathes from poor information flow, estimated payback 3-7 months depending on alert frequency. *Estimate to be validated*.

And the fair question from the production manager

“What if it misreads the heat number or the diameter?” — pulling known entities out of a supplier message is an anchored task, where the best models drop below 1.5% error [1]. And the reschedule is only a proposal: the planner sees it with the original email next to it, checks the extracted heat and diameter, and applies it or not.

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