What's Next
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For manufacturing

Run leaner across the back office.

Industrial and B2B manufacturers carry orders, specs and supplier paperwork on small back-office teams. We build AI agents that process the documents into clean ERP data, surface technical knowledge from your manuals and specs, and run structured B2B outbound to widen the pipeline. The result is a lean team that supports more accounts without drowning in rekeying or depending on who happens to be on the floor that day.

Industrial · Wholesale · B2B manufacturing

The challenge

A lean back office, a lot of paperwork.

Orders and documents rekeyed

Purchase orders, spec sheets and supplier invoices get typed into systems by hand, tying up staff and inviting errors. The work is slow and unrewarding, and a mistyped quantity or code can ripple into a wrong shipment or a margin error down the line.

Technical knowledge is locked away

Specs, manuals and process sit with a few experts, so answers depend on who’s on the floor that day. When a key person is out or retires, the knowledge goes with them, and everyone else waits or guesses on questions that should be quick to answer.

Sales relies on a few relationships

New business depends on existing accounts, with little structured outbound to widen the pipeline. Growth stalls when those relationships plateau, and there is rarely a dedicated effort to reach new buyers in a consistent, organised way.

How we work

Live in weeks, not quarters.

  1. 01

    DiscoveryWeek 1

    We map your workflow on your real data and pick the highest-ROI use case to ship first.

  2. 02

    DesignWeek 1–2

    We design the agent around your tools and guardrails, and prove it on a working prototype.

  3. 03

    BuildWeek 2–4

    We build it as real engineering: integrated, tested, with logging and human escalation.

  4. 04

    Launch & ownOngoing

    We deploy into your stack, hand over the code and docs, and tune it live with your team.

Questions

Frequently asked questions

How accurate is the order and invoice extraction, and what if it gets a code wrong?

It is tuned on your real document types and validates extracted fields against your ERP and rules, flagging low-confidence values for a human instead of posting them silently. Nothing goes through unchecked during onboarding; you review until accuracy is proven on your own paperwork. The goal is fewer errors than manual keying, with a record of what it read and posted.

Where does the knowledge agent get its answers, and can we trust them?

It answers only from your own manuals, spec sheets and SOPs, and it cites the source document so any answer can be verified on the floor. It does not invent specs from general knowledge; if the answer is not in your material, it says so. You control which documents and systems it can see.

Will it connect to our ERP and existing systems?

Yes, we build on top of the systems you already run rather than asking you to switch. The agent posts extracted data and reads knowledge through your ERP and document systems’ integration points, and routes exceptions to your existing workflows. Older or in-house systems can usually be integrated too.

How long until something is live?

A first use case, often order or invoice processing, is typically live in 2 to 4 weeks. We start with your highest-volume document or your most-asked technical questions, prove it on real examples, then expand. You see working output on your own data quickly rather than after a long build.

What does a typical project cost?

Most manufacturers start with one use case in the low thousands of euros to build, plus a monthly fee for hosting and usage. Set against the back-office hours saved and the errors avoided, the return is usually clear within a quarter. We scope the first project so it pays for itself before you expand it.

Do we own what you build, and how is our data handled?

You own the workflows, prompts, validation rules and integrations, documented so there is no lock-in. Order, supplier and technical data is processed on EU infrastructure under a data-processing agreement, scoped to the systems a use case needs, and never used to train shared public models. You keep control over retention and access.

Axel Dekker, founder of What's Next

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