Scoping Questions — Steve Andrean / Argea

1 Framing the problem

You mentioned 4 pain points: agent order entry, email-to-ERP, a B2B portal (longer horizon), and inter-company orders. Our read is that pains 1, 2, and 4 are variants of the same underlying problem: order entry arriving through different channels, all landing on a human who types it into SAP. Is that right, or do you see them as meaningfully different workflows?

2 Order dynamics

On a typical day, how many orders arrive? And how does the split look across channels — how much by email vs WhatsApp vs phone?

Do emails and WhatsApp orders arrive at a central address/number, or are they spread across individual sales reps' inboxes and personal phones? Who currently owns the inbox that needs to be monitored?

What does a complex order look like? Single product, or multi-line with different SKUs?

From the moment an order arrives today to when it's in SAP — how long does that take?

3 Process dynamics

Are there pricing rules that vary per distributor — promotions, contract tiers, country-specific discounts? Does the person entering the order need to validate that, or does SAP handle it?

When an order reference is ambiguous — say a product name that doesn't match your catalog exactly — what does the team do today? Call back, guess, flag?

Do you have a rough sense of the error rate? Orders that go into SAP wrong and need correction downstream?

4 The existing pilot context

The previous AI project — was it focused on order entry, or invoice processing (supplier side), or both? What specifically made it hard to get to production?

Is there any ongoing AI experimentation internally — even informal, even someone using Claude or ChatGPT in their daily work?

5 SAP integration

Which SAP module handles order entry — SD (Sales & Distribution)?

Is there an existing API layer or middleware between SAP and the rest of the stack, or does everything talk directly to SAP?

Who owns SAP internally — your IT team, or an external integrator who manages the instance?

You sell to 85 countries — are all those orders registered in the same SAP instance, or do different geographies have their own ERP?

6 Sales reps and success

When your sales reps need to submit an order today, how do they do it — do they send it themselves via WhatsApp or email, or does someone at HQ handle it from a phone call?

What would success look like in 90 days — for you personally, and for the person who needs to approve this moving forward?

Who else needs to be aligned before this can move — IT architecture, CFO, the Clessidra team?