The Container Arrived. Your Margin Did Not.
A container clears customs. The supplier invoice is posted. Freight arrives later. Duty sits in a broker PDF. The ERP says the inventory cost is complete because software can be confidently wrong at impressive speed.
A forward deployed AI engineer maps the path from shipment evidence to landed cost, inventory, and the general ledger. The goal is an auditable cost record, not a chatbot that improvises accounting.
Give Every Charge a Home
The agent reads supplier invoices, carrier bills, customs entries, and broker statements. It proposes the shipment, purchase order, currency, amount, fee type, and allocation basis. Rules reject duplicates, mismatched totals, missing evidence, and charges tied to closed periods. Finance approves exceptions.
The World Customs Organization says Data Model Version 4 provides standardized reusable trade data definitions and supports JSON and APIs. In plain English, customs data, logistics data, and ERP data need agreed names before they can move reliably.
Use six states: expected, received, matched, allocated, approved, posted. Give every source document a stable identity. A retry may repeat the request. It must not repeat the expense.
The ERP remains authoritative for inventory valuation and accounting. AI proposes matches. Code enforces totals, currencies, and posting periods. People approve material adjustments. A landed cost dashboard over missing charges is still bullshit with decimals.
Reuse the Unexciting Parts
The reusable agentic asset is the connector, document schema, extraction prompt, allocation rules, approval queue, audit log, and evaluation set. Over the past eight months, these pieces have become easier to package and test. The importer still owns its allocation policy. Weight, value, units, and volume produce different answers.
Measure the Close
Illustrative calculation: 120 monthly cost lines at 15 minutes of reconciliation require 30 hours. At five minutes each, they require 10 hours. At an assumed loaded labor cost of $50 per hour, 20 recovered hours equal $1,000 of monthly capacity, not guaranteed profit or payroll savings.
Track unallocated charges, duplicate bills, close delay, costs posted after sale, and forecast variance. Any margin improvement must be proven from actual purchase, freight, duty, sales, and collection records.
If the margin changes weeks after the goods are sold, the ERP is not reporting history. It is discovering it late.