Solution · Supply Chain
Supplier ETAs, in-transit material, and the next-week schedule against your raw inventory. Foreman surfaces the risk while there's still time to pull forward, substitute, or expedite — not on the Monday after the line went down.
The pain
The planner builds a shortage report every Monday morning from ERP exports, a supplier-confirmations spreadsheet, and the production-schedule pivot table that lives on someone's desktop. By the time it's circulated, half the data is already stale, and the half that matters is the line that's about to stop on Wednesday.
Suppliers send ETAs that drift. Customs holds containers without telling anyone. Your line-side inventory drops below MOQ and nobody notices until the supervisor walks the dock. Each one is a small miss; together they cost you the shift you needed for the OEM call-off this week.
The data exists, scattered across ERP, supplier portals, and freight forwarder emails. What's missing is anyone who can read all of it in the same minute and act on it before the planner's next report.
What Foreman does about it
Foreman watches your supplier portals, freight-forwarder feeds, and inbound-shipment confirmations. The moment an ETA slips or a container holds, it reconciles against your production schedule and flags the parts that now have less buffer than they need.
Built on · Decision Layer
Instead of a Monday spreadsheet, you get a rolling forecast: 'Part 4032 will be short by Wednesday 14:00 at current consumption.' With the inputs shown — ETA changes, current line-side stock, scheduled draw rate — your planner can act, not investigate.
Built on · Decision Layer · Digital Twin
Foreman proposes the recovery your planner would have chosen: pull forward from a second supplier, substitute to a qualified alternate, or trigger an expedite quote. Each option comes with the trade-off — cost, lead time, OEM impact — so the call is informed, not improvised.
Built on · Agent Engine
Every shortage event, every action taken, every cost incurred is logged with its inputs. When the OEM asks why a substitution was used, or finance asks why an expedite was paid, the answer is in the trail — not in your planner's memory.
Built on · Decision Layer
What we'd move
Lead time gained between a supplier-ETA slip and the planner's first recovery action, on a typical multi-supplier inbound flow.
Reduction in unplanned expedites — most of the cost-saving comes from catching the slip while a cheaper recovery is still available.
Inbound-driven line stops logged with cause, cost, and recovery action — every event OEM-audit-ready.
* Discovery-stage estimates from supplier-flow walkthroughs with Tier-1/2 plants. Replaced with measured numbers as pilots run.
The one outcome that matters
Not on the Monday after. Foreman collapses the gap between an ETA slip and the planner's response from days to minutes, with the recovery already drafted.
Where it lands
ERP & MRP
SAP, Oracle, Infor, Sage. Foreman reads BOM, MOQ, lead-time master data, and the rolling production schedule — read-only by default.
Supplier portals & EDI
Supplier confirmations, ASNs, and EDI 856/862 feeds. Where there's no portal, Foreman ingests supplier email confirmations and reconciles them to the PO line.
Freight & customs feeds
Freight-forwarder APIs, port-status feeds, and customs-clearance signals. ETA drift lands in the same view as the production impact it implies.
We don't replace your ERP — we make the planner running it twice as effective by closing the loop between supplier signal and shop-floor consequence. See the full integration list →
Industry fit
Field notes
A 30-minute call to walk through your inbound flow, your shortage workflow, and where Foreman would change the next miss you'd otherwise have absorbed.
