4blue is a sustainable energy wholesaler based in Wijchen, the Netherlands. The company supplies solar panels, inverters and climate solutions to installers, and backs them up with technical advice. For storage, fulfilment and transport, 4blue works with DFDS. That partnership is strategically crucial to the business. For 4blue, IT Capacity has developed two quite different solutions: elaborate middleware between 4blue’s ERP, their warehouse partner and their suppliers, and an AI chatbot for their customers’ technical questions. The two projects may have little in common on paper, but in practice share one thing: they demand far more than good, robust technology alone.
There were communication rules present between 4blue and DFDS, but this required a lot of manual actions with a lot of room for error. On top of that, once you dig into the processes and business rules, a surprising number of exceptions turn up. Secondly, 4blue wanted an AI chatbot for installers’ technical questions that would never give ungrounded answers. Wrong advice has real consequences here.
Middleware
A robust and scalable middleware solution integrating 4blue’s ERP, DFDS and the suppliers. Orders and order confirmations go through a large set of business rules that determine if and how they should be sent to the ERP, DFDS or a supplier. Unavailability of any integrated party and missing or corrupt data is handled gracefully at every step in the process.
AI chatbot
A chatbot that solely gets its information from 4blue’s product data and documentation that it gathered from supplier websites, with a strong focus on guardrails. It is highly accurate, protected from breaking its guardrails and knows when to ask for more information or redirect to a human contact. The provided usage reports help 4blue spread support across its channels, and the pressure on the support team has dropped.
“IT Capacity is not only technically strong, but analytically strong too. They need only half a word to understand where we want to go, and then ask exactly the questions that make you take another hard look at your own processes and business rules. They come up with solutions we had not thought of ourselves, and if something does go wrong, they have spotted it before we have. Not a supplier carrying out an assignment, but a sparring partner that takes responsibility for the solution.”