Knowing which certificate expired before a retailer asks
Supplier evidence across more than forty suppliers, where the documents exist but their status and ownership are not visible enough to depend on.
A premium soft drinks producer turning over around three million pounds, working with more than forty suppliers.
A delivered Orchyn engagement. The client is anonymised at their request. The company and the people are not named. The operation, the workflow, the controls and the outcome are as delivered.
The commercial problem
Specifications, certificates, allergen declarations and delivery documents sit across email folders, shared drives and supplier portals. The team can usually find the evidence, just not quickly enough when an issue or an audit demands it.
This is a hidden compliance and service risk. The evidence exists. Its status and ownership do not, which is the part that matters when a retailer asks.
How the work runs before
- An administrator receives certificates and specifications by email or downloads them from portals.
- Files are saved into shared folders with inconsistent names.
- The quality lead checks expiry dates, allergen statements and completeness by hand.
- The supply chain manager chases suppliers for missing or updated documents.
- When a retailer or an internal team asks a question, staff search several folders and inboxes for the right version.
- A monthly spreadsheet lists known gaps, relying on manual updating that can fall behind.
What makes it hard to automate safely
- Quality and product safety decisions are not delegated to software under any circumstances.
- The model can classify documents and detect gaps. Technical review and release stay with the quality lead.
- Supplier documentation is commercially sensitive and must be segregated by access.
- Expiry dates, product names and certificate types appear in many formats.
- The business needed evidence links, not a chatbot style answer.
What we change first
The process was rebuilt as a controlled supplier evidence register. A standard supplier record, a mandatory document list, a review cadence, an expiry policy and an escalation path were all defined before any extraction began.
The redesigned workflow
- Approved supplier documents enter a dedicated evidence workspace.
- The model classifies the document and extracts supplier, product, document type, issue date, expiry date and stated allergen information, linking the source file.
- The workflow compares it against the required evidence checklist and raises a proposed missing, expiring or conflicting document alert.
- The quality lead reviews proposed records and technical interpretations. Low confidence, an altered allergen statement or a conflicting document always triggers manual investigation.
- The register and dashboard show due reviews, missing documents and open supplier actions.
Where the model stops
The model classifies, extracts and detects gaps. It does not interpret a specification, approve a supplier or release a product. Every retailer response traces back to a controlled evidence record approved by a person.
What we learned
The problem was never document storage. It was that nobody could see status. Extraction is the cheap part. Deciding what evidence is mandatory, who owns it and when it expires is the work that made it usable.