Example project · Assistants for your team and your customers - A Teams assistant for chasing supplier confirmations
The purchasing manager spends mornings cross-checking open POs against supplier emails. We build an assistant in Teams that answers the questions she asks every day and drafts the follow-ups.
Illustrative project plan. Company details describe the scenario; this page does not claim a completed customer engagement or measured results.
Meridian Valve & Fitting. $30M revenue, valves and fittings, one purchasing manager and two buyers.
The situation
Open purchase orders live in the ERP. Supplier confirmations live in email. Finding which orders due this week are unconfirmed takes a report, a spreadsheet, and an inbox search.
Follow-up emails are written from scratch every time, so some suppliers get chased late.
What we would build
- A nightly export of open POs, expected dates, and confirmation status into a small database the assistant is allowed to read.
- An assistant in Microsoft Teams that answers a defined set of questions, shows where each answer came from and how fresh the data is, and never invents a value it cannot find.
- Draft follow-up emails saved to the buyer’s Outlook drafts folder, addressed and filled in, for the buyer to send.
The workflow in action
The question in Teams
“Which POs due this week are still missing supplier confirmations?” Access is limited to the records the employee is authorized to see. A missing confirmation is not proof that the shipment is late.
The answer with context
3 POs have no confirmation in the 08:00 snapshot.
- Source: Open_PO_export_2026-09-07.csv, captured September 7, 2026 at 08:00 ET.
- Requested dates shown are customer-entered, not supplier commitments.
- PO-2104 Northline Components · PO-2118 Westbrook Supply · PO-2122 Harbor Industrial.
The follow-up, drafted not sent.
- Draft for PO-2104
- “Could you confirm the accepted ship date and quantities for PO-2104? Our requested date is September 10. Please flag any partial shipment or changed availability.”
- Before sending
- The employee reviews the recipient, PO details, and message. The workflow must handle stale records and failed lookups rather than presenting them as current facts.
What you would see - Week by week, what lands on your desk.
Weeks 1 to 2
The list of questions the assistant will answer, agreed with purchasing, and the export running nightly.
Week 3
The assistant in a Teams channel answering the first five questions, with your purchasing manager checking every answer against the ERP.
Week 4
Draft follow-up emails appearing in Outlook drafts, reviewed and sent by the buyer.
Week 5
Rollout to the two buyers, a short written guide, and a session on what the assistant will and will not do.
What you would have at the end
- The assistant, its permitted questions, and the data it can see, all documented.
- The nightly export job with a failure alert.
- A log of questions and answers your team can review for accuracy.
What it would not do
- Sending anything. Every email is a draft until a person sends it.
- Access to anything beyond the agreed export. No open-ended access to the ERP or mailboxes.
- Answering questions outside the agreed set. It says so instead of guessing.
How we would measure it
- Minutes per day purchasing spends assembling the unconfirmed-order list.
- Late supplier confirmations per week.
- Answer accuracy from the review log, sampled weekly for the first month.
Let’s start with one thing.
What would better performance look like?
Bring a result you want to improve, a symptom, or a workflow you already understand. You do not need to know the bottleneck yet. We’ll help choose what to investigate first.
No transaction files needed for the first conversation.