Serialized machines, from vendor invoice to bill, without retyping a serial.

The business

Aerial Titans is a nationwide dealer of new and used aerial lifts and telehandlers, buying from manufacturers like JLG, Skyjack, Genie and Niftylift and from rental fleets like Sunbelt and United Rentals. Every machine is a serialized asset in NetSuite, tracked from the vendor’s paperwork to the yard to the customer.

The challenge

Vendor paperwork arrived in every shape: invoices, order acknowledgements, and sales orders that were really invoices, with serial numbers buried anywhere on the page. Purchasing keyed each PO and receipt by hand, and AP re-keyed the same serials onto the bill and checked terms, price and freight against the PO line by line. Off-the-shelf AP tools had failed on serialized inventory. In the controller’s words, “every vendor that said they can handle it comes back and then can’t.” Sales reps waited on accounting to tell them whether a machine was available, committed or paid for.

Implementation

The Experts were built with Aerial Titans’ purchasing and AP teams on their own documents and tuned in weekly check-ins. Purchasing and billing were split into separate Experts with hard handoffs once accounting took over AP in September. The controller asked the team to “try to break it”, and each break became a rule, such as reading serials where JLG prints them and treating a vendor’s “sales order” as the invoice.