Production tracking, from order to invoicing, lived in a shared spreadsheet. Purchase orders arrived as PDFs in a different format for every client and were re-typed by hand, while major clients demanded traceability the spreadsheet could not provide.
A hybrid model. The tracking application holds the data, the rules and the history. The AI assistant is connected to it, and the team talks to it directly to act in the tool: it reads the purchase order received as a PDF, whatever its format, splits it into one order per model and puts it into tracking as a draft.
Orders enter without re-typing, and nothing reaches production tracking without a human validating the draft. One source of truth from order to invoicing, every change traced: who, what, when. The team owns the tool, the accounts and the data.