Email dispute agent

The Problem

Lighting Systems is a manufacturing company that deals with a steady stream of inbound supplier disputes — pricing discrepancies, delivery shortfalls, quality complaints, and contract disagreements. Their ops team was spending multiple days per week manually logging, categorizing, and routing these disputes through email.

The process was slow, inconsistent, and expensive. Disputes that should have been resolved in hours were taking days. Some were falling through the cracks entirely, leading to direct financial losses.

What We Diagnosed

We mapped Lighting's dispute handling workflow and found that 70% of incoming disputes followed predictable patterns — they could be categorized, contextualized, and routed without human intervention if the system had access to the right data.

The remaining 30% genuinely required human judgment. We recommended keeping those manual.

What We Built

An email inbox agent that:

• Monitors the shared disputes inbox in real-time
• Categorizes incoming disputes by type (pricing, delivery, quality, contract) using the email content and sender history
• Pulls relevant context from Lighting's ERP system — purchase orders, delivery records, contract terms — and attaches it to the dispute record
• Routes with a recommended action to the appropriate team member based on dispute type and dollar value
• Escalates edge cases that don't match known patterns to a human reviewer with full context attached

The system runs on monitored infrastructure with logging for every decision made.

The Results

Lighting saw direct cost recovery in month one — disputes that previously sat unresolved for days were being routed and resolved within hours, preventing the compounding costs of delayed resolution.