Prior to licensing Refresh Desktop, the company was facing significant issues with its supply chain data, especially critical material master data for its complex configurable products as well as its semi-finished, raw, pack and spare part materials. Despite having access to all the master data tools from SAP, MDG, as well as a Big3 management consultancy on-site (teamed-up with the leading American artificial intelligence provider), there had emerged no practical solution.
In hindsight the missing ingredient was Refresh’s proprietary datasets, its 10 years of integration and its many AI-enabled workflows already categorizing, classifying and deduplicating similar SAP customers materials all at once. This client realized that even if the latest on-tap LLM model from the likes of OpenAI or Anthropic “understands” to some extent the subject, the prompts are not targeted enough without the key AI datasets local to Refresh, local to SAP, and local to the customer, all of which are deeply pre-integrated and presented in proven workflows for that ERP system. Without a pre-built tool, these data sets first have to be built, and then they all need to be stitched together. Since Refresh had been building out exactly this proprietary AI data integration for more than a decade, this was a quick way to get a true AI success story under the belt within a few weeks. Vibe-coding or learning as you go is not an option in an industry with zero tolerance for errors.
Now that Refresh has been successfully delivered as phase 1, the team is further leveraging the Refresh datasets and dictionaries with mandatory attributes per material type to support implementation of a global product data standard including translation support for all key languages and coding to the correct UNSPSC and Tariff Codes (Harmonized Tariff System, HTS). A side project has been initiated to look at which general SAAS data software could possibly be replaced by Refresh and the AI models in the short term. What started as an AI-driven deduplication agent now helps with the timely go-live of each new division, delivering rationalized and clean supply chain materials fast for this excellent business.