The context
Hundreds of incidents per month.
Always playing catch-up.
A major B2B distributor of consumer goods—a supplier to professional cleaning companies with thousands of delivery centers—deals with incidents on a daily basis. It’s the nature of the business: high volume, demanding customers, a complex supply chain.
The problem wasn’t having incidents. The problem was managing them without structural visibility. Each incident was resolved individually—and the pattern behind a hundred seemingly distinct incidents was never seen. The team was putting out fires. The same fires, week after week.
Without cross-referenced data, without systematic analysis, it was impossible to know what caused what. There were only hunches. And hunches don’t generate action plans.
The Process
Three phases to move
from reacting to preventing.
The project didn’t start with AI. It started by bringing order to the chaos. Without quality data, analysis isn’t possible—and without analysis, there are no action plans. AI came into play once there was something to analyze.
Implement the ticketing system.
The first step was to structure the incident process with a ticketing system. Before, incidents came in via email, phone, and WhatsApp—unclassified, untraceable, and without data. The ticketing system turned chaos into data. Without this step, everything that followed would have been impossible.
Cross-reference ticketing with operational data from the ERP.
With Kelmia Pulse, ticketing data was cross-referenced with operational variables from the ERP: days between order receipt and delivery, merchandise value, customer type, geographic area. Cross-referencing both sources made the invisible visible: which types of incidents were concentrated under what conditions and which causes were structural—not random.
Action plans addressing root causes.
With the patterns identified, Kelmia Pulse generated concrete action plans: process changes, correction of protocols that were not being followed, and actions addressing specific causes. No more guesswork—data, causes, and actions. Each plan included KPIs for tracking and progress measured week by week.
The finding
Stockouts.
The cause that no one had quantified.
The analysis identified stockouts as the main cause of delay incidents. It was a suspicion the team had—but it had never been measured, cross-referenced with delivery data, or linked to its actual impact on the customer experience.
With the pattern quantified, it was possible to act on the cause—not the symptom. And that completely changed the kind of conversation the distributor could have internally and with its customers.
It wasn’t a new problem. It was a pattern that had always been there—invisible because no one had cross-referenced the data.
The results
A sustained trend.
Not a one-off result.
The improvement wasn’t immediate—and that’s what makes it credible and sustainable. The first results came when the initial action plans began to be implemented. Data from the ticketing system shows the actual trend: peaks of 28–30 tickets per day in the first few months, a stable and downward trend in the following months, with a cumulative satisfaction rate of 91%.
The unexpected difference
The client report.
Something almost no distributor can offer.
Reducing incidents was the goal. But the most valuable commercial outcome was something else: the ability to provide each client with a monthly report detailing their incidents, the identified causes, and the actions taken to prevent them from recurring.
From distributor to operations partner.
What most do.
Manage incidents as they arise. Resolve them as quickly as possible. Close the ticket. The customer knows there was an incident. They don’t know why it happened or if it will happen again. The relationship is reactive—the distributor responds, not anticipates.
What Kelmia Pulse enables.
Provide the customer with a monthly report detailing their classified incidents, identified causes, and the actions taken to resolve them. The customer sees that someone is actively working to ensure the problems do not recur. That is not incident management—it is operational transparency. And it is a selling point for contract renewals and new bids that very few distributors can offer.
Few distribution companies can sit down with a customer and say: "Here is this month’s report—these were the incidents, these were the causes, and this is what we’ve done to prevent them from happening again."
The system evolves
Identifying the cause
is only the first step.
Kelmia Pulse identified stockouts as the main cause of delays. The next logical step isn’t just to manage stockouts better—it’s to anticipate them and resolve them before they cause an incident.