A nationally-scaled logistics company was losing time, money, and ops sanity across two broken workflows — vendor onboarding and vendor invoice management. We rebuilt both as one connected platform, and now operate it under SLA.
A national logistics operator running thousands of vendor relationships — owner-operator trucks, regional warehouses, last-mile partners, fuel suppliers — had two workflows quietly bleeding margin and time.
Workflow one: vendor onboarding was running on a mix of spreadsheets, email threads, and a creaky internal portal. Each new vendor required document collection, KYC verification, contract execution, banking setup, and compliance checks. Cycles routinely stretched to 10–14 working days. The ops team had no real-time view of where any vendor sat in the funnel.
Workflow two: vendor invoice management was worse. Vendors submitted invoices via email, WhatsApp, and physical paper. Each invoice required validation against the underlying purchase order or service agreement, tax and withholding compliance checks, multi-stage internal approvals, and finally reconciliation against the bank payment. Disputes were common. Approval TATs slipped routinely. The finance team spent a third of their week chasing exceptions instead of running the business.
The two workflows weren’t connected — even though the vendor data was the same. The same vendor master existed in three places with three sets of truth. Audits became fire drills every quarter.
They came to us with one ask: rebuild the full vendor lifecycle — onboarding through invoice settlement — as a single connected platform. And keep running it for us under SLA — they had no in-house bandwidth to maintain another internal tool.
Two reasons. First, every other vendor they evaluated pitched a 6-month rebuild with a handover at the end. The ops leader had been burned before — a polished platform delivered, then a 12-month decay as the original team disappeared. They wanted a partner who would build and run, not build and disappear.
Second, the workflow was AI-native by nature. Both onboarding and invoice processing are document-heavy with high input variance — registration documents, banking proofs, vehicle registrations on the onboarding side; line-item invoices, supporting POs, and reconciliation statements on the invoice side. We pitched a build that used document understanding from day one across both workflows, with the same vendor master powering everything.
A guided onboarding flow accessed via a mobile-friendly web app and WhatsApp deep links — the dominant channel in the segment. Vendors upload documents, provide details, complete KYC — entirely self-serve, with proactive nudges via WhatsApp and SMS when anything is incomplete.
Every uploaded document — tax registration certificates, identity proofs, vehicle registrations, banking proofs on onboarding; tax invoices, line items, and supporting POs on the invoice side — flows through an LLM-based extraction layer. Confidence scoring identifies low-quality inputs for human review. Zero manual data entry for clean documents; a precise exception queue for everything else.
Every submitted invoice is automatically validated against the underlying purchase order or service agreement, with tax and withholding compliance checks running in parallel. Mismatches surface immediately with explanations — not just “rejected,” but “invoice line 3 exceeds PO line 3 by $50; tolerance is 5%.” Vendors see what’s wrong in real time and self-correct without a back-and-forth email chain.
Configurable approval matrices by invoice type, value, region, and approver role. Every step has an SLA. The system auto-escalates when a step is stalled. A dashboard shows approval TAT health in real time, by region, by approver, by invoice type. The TAT metric the operator cared about most went from “we sort of track it monthly” to live and enforced.
The platform reconciles approved invoices against actual bank disbursements automatically. Variances flag exception queues for the finance team. Two-way sync with the operator’s accounting system and bank statements means reconciliation that used to take 2–3 weeks per cycle now happens continuously.
A unified dashboard showing every vendor and every invoice in flight — by stage, by region, by SLA breach status. Bulk actions, exception queues, drill-down audit trails. A weekly automated report goes to ops and finance leadership with no manual compilation required.
Twelve weeks of weekly sprints, with working software visible at every gate. Rolled out by region rather than big-bang — which meant real vendors on the platform from week 13, with a safety net on both sides.
Working sessions with ops and finance leadership to map every state, every document type, every compliance rule, every approval matrix. Integration contracts signed with ERP, accounting system, and bank feed providers. Architecture signed off by end of week 2. Vendor portal wireframes locked — WhatsApp flow included — before a single line of production code was written.
Vendor self-serve onboarding shipped. WhatsApp deep-link integration live. AI document extraction reached production quality for onboarding documents — tax certificates, identity proofs, banking proofs, vehicle registrations — with confidence scoring routing edge cases to a human queue. The ops team ran 20 real vendors through the new flow in week 5 before we moved to the invoice side.
Invoice submission flow, AI extraction layer for invoices and POs, validation engine, tax compliance checks, and the configurable approval matrix engine all shipped. Finance leadership signed off on the approval logic in a 2-hour working session at the end of week 8. The real-time validation feedback — vendor sees exactly what’s wrong, not just “rejected” — was the feature the finance team cited most in UAT feedback.
SLA enforcement layer built and configured against the approval matrices. Auto-escalation logic tested with the ops team. Bank reconciliation sync wired and validated against 3 months of historical payment data. Ops and finance dashboard shipped. Automated weekly report built and signed off by leadership.
Full UAT with ops and finance teams across both workflows. External security review completed. Eleven issues found across both teams; all resolved before go-live. Phased rollout by region: first region live at end of week 12, with Solprime on standby. Remaining regions migrated over the following 3 weeks without incident.
Solprime owns ongoing operations — monitoring, incident response, monthly improvement releases, and quarterly compliance reviews. The operator’s team uses the platform; Solprime keeps it running and keeps it improving. One year in, no production incidents requiring emergency response. Monthly releases have shipped 14 capability improvements requested by ops and finance leadership.
Numbers from the first year of live operation across both workflows. Every figure reflects real vendor and invoice activity on the production platform.
What I needed was a partner who would build the platform AND keep running it. Every other vendor we’d talked to would have handed us a codebase and disappeared. Solprime built it in 12 weeks, then kept operating it. A year in, it’s still the most reliable internal tool we have — and we didn’t have to staff up an engineering team to make that happen.
If you run operations or finance at an enterprise and you have a vendor lifecycle that’s been broken for too long, the lesson from this build is straightforward: the bottleneck is rarely the technology. It’s the operating model around the team building it. Six-month timelines from traditional agencies are an artifact of how they staff and bill, not how long the actual work takes — and the post-launch decay is an artifact of treating internal tools as one-time projects rather than living platforms that need to keep evolving.
We built this in 12 weeks because we ran it as 12 one-week sprints with full visibility, made AI document understanding a foundational decision rather than a feature, and have continued operating the platform under SLA ever since. The same model is available for your vendor workflow, your claims pipeline, your reconciliation engine, or any other operationally-critical workflow that’s quietly costing your team a quarter of its week.
If you’re tired of a workflow that ops and finance keep patching with spreadsheets — and you want a team that builds the platform AND runs it under SLA — let’s talk.