What was the problem?
Every reorder decision lived in the owner’s head: what to buy, how much, and from whom, across about 3,150 products and 280 vendors.
Cash sat in products that moved slowly while the fast sellers ran out. A quarter of the year’s revenue lands in one holiday season, so a bad call in the spring costs them twice: once in stock that sits, and again in sales they can’t fill.
What did Airu Labs build?
A purchasing system connected to their ERP. It does three things on a schedule:
- Every night it pulls the day’s sales and current stock for every product.
- Every morning it hands the owner a buy list: the item, the quantity, and the vendor.
- When he approves it, the purchase order writes itself straight back into the ERP.
The list is ranked by what each vendor earns the business after margin, delivery speed and reliability, so the first lines are the ones that matter most.
How does the buy list decide what to order?
It looks at what sold, what is on the shelf, and what each vendor has delivered in the past. A line the team has been reordering out of habit shows up as what it is: money sitting still.
| Before | After |
|---|---|
| Reorder decisions made from memory | A ranked list built from sales and stock data every night |
| A week of the owner’s attention | A few minutes of review each morning |
| Habit reorders nobody questioned | Four out of every ten lines flagged as slow stock |
| Purchase orders typed into the ERP by hand | The approved order writes itself into the ERP |
What changed for the business?
Buying went from a week of the owner’s attention to a few minutes of review each morning.
Four out of every ten lines they had been reordering out of habit turned out to be money sitting still, so the system stopped ordering them. That put about $22,000 a year back into products that sell, and handed the owner 40 hours a month.
The company is not named on this page at its own request. The numbers come from the system itself.
Could this work for my distribution business?
If your sales and stock already live in an ERP or accounting system, the data the buy list needs is already there. The question for a first call is which decision costs you the most when it goes wrong: running out of fast sellers, or cash stuck in slow ones. Airu Labs builds around that one decision first.
See the ordering assistant built for the same kind of business, or the ten questions to ask before you hire an AI developer.