Elevon in ForbesThe Weekly Restock, Priced Across Five Suppliers, Done Overnight
A weekly price-hunter that reads stock, finds what is low, and compares prices across roughly five suppliers to build one best-price shopping list.
Client
Our hospitality client
Industry
Food & hospitality
Solution
Custom AI automation (Elevon suite)
Deployment
Production
One human step in the whole suite portfolio.
The Challenge
Weekly procurement means checking roughly five suppliers by hand: which items fell below their minimum stock level, and which supplier sells each one cheapest this week. It is slow, repetitive work that lands on someone every single week.
Four of the five suppliers publish prices that a machine can read. The fifth is a membership wholesale supplier whose prices sit behind a login that cannot be automated, so a full end-to-end run is impossible without a person at one point.
The goal was not to remove the person. It was to remove everything around the person, so the only manual action left is the one a machine genuinely cannot do.
Why Elevon
Elevon built a weekly suite that carries the whole procurement run and stops for exactly one thing: the login only a human can pass. Three ideas hold it together.
Read stock, find what is low
The run starts from current stock, compares each item against its minimum threshold, and keeps only the items that need buying this week. Nothing else is priced or compared.
Compare across ~5 suppliers
For that short list, the suite pulls current prices from each readable supplier and lines them up item by item. The output is one consolidated list of what to buy and where it is cheapest.
Pause for the one login
When it reaches the membership supplier, the suite pauses and asks a person to paste those prices via a deep link, then resumes on its own. This is the single human-in-the-loop step in the whole suite portfolio.
“The machine does everything except the one thing only a person can do: log in. Then it finishes the job by itself.”
The Rollout
The suite runs as a real weekly workflow: one scheduled run reads stock, builds the short list, prices the readable suppliers, and stops at the login step for a human to fill in.
The pause is guarded so it only fires when it is actually needed, and a timeout of about six hours ends the run cleanly if no one responds, so a run never hangs forever waiting on a person.
What this looks like in practice
In practice the person opens the deep link once a week, pastes in the membership supplier prices, and closes it. Everything before and after that moment is the machine: reading stock, deciding what is low, pricing the other suppliers, and merging it all into one list.
The suite
Read stock and find what is low
Price the readable suppliers
Pause for the membership login
Consolidate the shopping list
Illustrative reconstruction of the production suite.
The Results
As a running weekly workflow, the suite turns a manual five-supplier comparison into one short human action and a finished list.
The weekly comparison across roughly five suppliers no longer happens by hand; the suite does it and hands over one list.
Only items below their minimum threshold are priced, so the run stays focused on what actually needs buying this week.
The single human step is reduced to pasting one supplier’s prices via a deep link, instead of checking every supplier by hand.
The guard and the roughly six-hour timeout keep runs predictable: the pause fires only when needed and never hangs waiting on a person.
Hours
saved / week
1
human step left
Best
price per item
Figures are illustrative and stand in for the client’s real numbers; they will be replaced with measured values from live weekly runs.
“We did not automate the person away. We automated everything around them, so the one manual step is the only one that has to be manual.”
Why It Worked
The suite draws a clean line between what a machine can do and what it cannot. Reading stock, filtering, and comparing prices are automated; the one login stays with a person, by design, not by accident.
The human-in-the-loop step is safe because it is bounded: a guard so it only asks when needed, and a timeout so a missed response ends the run cleanly instead of leaving it stuck.
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