Foreign trade and distribution
An importer
Eighty suppliers, each with its own arrangement, and the detail of what was agreed buried in the email thread of whoever negotiated it.
The mess
The price agreed with the Shenzhen supplier includes freight to Guayaquil, but that lives in a September email and not in the contract. Nobody wrote down the tariff code the customs broker used last quarter. The spec sheet the customer is asking for exists in three languages and none of the three files says which one is current.
What changes
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One file per supplier holding what was agreed, what was quoted and what went wrong
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Search years of commercial correspondence without opening the mailbox
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Spec sheets and certificates where the person serving the customer can find them, not only the person who requested them
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The agent builds the quote comparison by reading the documents instead of asking again
Where the mess lives
The agreement is the contract plus the emails
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The critical information arrives by email and stays in the email. The real agreement is almost never the signed contract: it is the contract plus the messages where the price moved, the incoterm changed and a credit note was agreed.
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When the person who ran that supplier moves to another role, the real agreement goes with them. What is left is the contract, which says less.
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The same thing happens downstream. Sales needs the spec sheet and the certificate of origin to answer a customer, and asks logistics, who go looking on their own laptop. Two days of delay over a file that already existed.
What Vonzay does
One record per supplier, searchable by content
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One record per supplier, inside the foreign trade folder: the contract, the quotes, the correspondence that matters, the invoices, the certificates, the minutes of the renegotiation. All searchable by content, not by file name.
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Search by meaning is what makes the difference here. "Who gave us freight included to port" finds the email that said "CIF Guayaquil", without anyone having to remember the acronym.
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Foreign trade sees purchase costs. Sales sees the spec sheet and the certificate, and does not see the margin. Accounting sees the invoices. The permission tree is the org chart, not a list of shared folders.
A concrete example
Compare the three quotes for the submersible pump container, tell me which one lands cheapest in the warehouse allowing for freight and the tariff we actually paid last time, and leave me the table in the product record.
What the agent does
The agent reads the three quotes, looks up the customs settlement from the previous shipment to find out what tariff was really paid, builds the comparison and writes it as a new note in the product folder, linking every document it used.
If it needs a calculation that is not trivial, it can run Python to do it, in a container with no network that is destroyed when it finishes. It does not invent the number.
What we will not promise you
No connectors and no customs calculation
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We do not connect to your ERP, your billing system or your mailbox. There are no connectors today: documents get in because somebody uploads or drags them, and that is a real limitation rather than a design preference.
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We do not track shipments and we do not do certified customs calculation. The arithmetic the agent does runs over the documents you gave it, and it needs the same review you would give a new assistant's.
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One department's agent does not see another department's files. If you want it to compare purchase cost against sale price, those two documents have to sit in the same department or somebody has to share them.
Other shapes of company