How Intra Lighting keeps a grip on purchasing in AFAS with AI

Intra Lighting designs and manufactures architectural lighting and smart light solutions for offices, retail, hotels and projects worldwide. The company started in 1989 in Slovenia and now has its own production sites in Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia, with branches in the Netherlands among other countries. From the Dutch office the team serves customers in the Benelux. All that purchasing and sales runs through AFAS.

The challenge: checking every order confirmation by hand

For every purchase order Intra Lighting places, an order confirmation comes back from the manufacturer. That has to match exactly what is in AFAS. The team therefore compared each order confirmation line by line with the purchase order. With a few lines that is manageable, but with a confirmation of several pages it becomes time-consuming and prone to errors. And it is precisely the small deviations that matter most to find.

Order 3,000 units and 4,000 get confirmed, then the difference is just one digit. Yet that is exactly the kind of mistake that must not slip through. On top of that, every supplier works slightly differently, and much of that knowledge sat in the heads of the team.

"That is exactly the tricky part. Maybe Claude even understands it better than we do sometimes."

Stefan, Account Manager @ Intra Lighting

Intra Lighting was looking for a way to make that check more reliable and faster, without giving up the overview.

The solution: AI that works directly with AFAS

Intra Lighting chose iWeb AI Connect for AFAS. This connector links an AI assistant securely to AFAS. The team drags an order confirmation into the chat and the AI does the rest: reading the confirmation, finding the matching purchase order in AFAS, comparing everything and, once approved, updating the purchase order.

It became more than just installing a connector. iWeb guided the team from the first demo to daily use: setting up the connector together, translating Intra Lighting's way of working into fixed AI procedures and testing them live within a few sessions using real order confirmations. As a result the AI now does the following:

• Checks order confirmations. Every line is automatically compared with the purchase order in AFAS. Deviations are listed clearly straight away.
• Updates AFAS after approval. If everything is correct, the AI updates the purchase order, exactly as the team would do themselves.
• Processes several at once. Dragging ten order confirmations into the chat in one go is also possible. The AI works through them one by one.
• Creates sales orders. A customer order, as a PDF or as text, becomes a sales order in AFAS in one go.

Secure and always under control

An AI looking into the administration rightly raises questions. iWeb AI Connect is purely a conduit between the AI assistant and AFAS and stores no data itself. Intra Lighting decides which data may be read and updated, every action is visible and write actions only happen after approval. The connector has been independently pentested and falls under iWebDevelopment's ISO 27001 certification.

The impact: more reliable and faster

The biggest difference lies in the reliability. Where the team previously had to compare and calculate everything by hand, the AI now does this consistently for every line and shows exactly why.

"This is actually more solid than how we sometimes do it ourselves."

Stefan, Account Manager @ Intra Lighting

Adjusting the process is also easy. A new arrangement with a supplier or an extra check is simply typed into the chat in Dutch, and the work procedure adapts accordingly. The daily routine has become straightforward as a result: drag order confirmations into the chat, review the results and give approval.

The next step: the sales side too

With purchase control as a solid foundation, Intra Lighting keeps building. Creating sales orders is already in place, and the next step is to automatically send customers a draft email when a delivery changes. The more the team works with the AI, the more ideas emerge to make other processes in AFAS smarter too.

Do you want AI to work alongside you in AFAS as well?

At iWebDevelopment we help companies like Intra Lighting put AI to work safely and practically in their administration. Whether it concerns purchase control, sales orders or reports in AFAS or Exact Online, we set it up together with you, translate your way of working into clear AI work procedures and keep thinking along as you want to go further.

Curious what AI can mean for your processes? Get in touch for a no-obligation conversation. We are happy to think along with you.