SPL Treatments, a Sheffield-based specialist in surface treatments for aerospace components, is working with Lleverage on a problem every certified supplier will recognise: translating dense customer purchase orders into exactly the right treatment route. What used to take 30 to 60 minutes of expert reading now takes 2 to 3 minutes, with the reasoning shown for every recommendation.
In aerospace, there is no second chance
Surface treatment for aerospace is precision work under strict certification. SPL operates to the rigorous standards required for NADCAP accreditation, the quality benchmark for special processes in aerospace. Getting a treatment route wrong is not an option when the components end up in aircraft.
The difficulty starts before any treatment happens, at the booking desk. Customer purchase orders arrive as dense documents, often 60 pages or more, with specifications nested inside specifications. Reading one correctly means knowing which of the hundreds of specs apply, in which revision, in which combination. That knowledge traditionally lived with one or two specialists, and every purchase order queued up for their attention.
What the AI agent does
Together with Lleverage, SPL built an AI agent that handles the reading and cross-referencing:
- Reads incoming purchase orders end to end, including PDFs and attachments
- Cross-references every requirement against SPL’s library of more than 800 specifications
- Recommends the treatment route in 2 to 3 minutes, instead of 30 to 60 minutes of manual work
- Shows its reasoning, citing the specifications and logic behind every recommendation
- Improves over time based on feedback from the team
The transparency is the point. The agent does not hand the booking team a black-box answer, it hands them a recommendation with the cited specs and reasoning attached, so a human can verify it against the same standards NADCAP demands. Judgment stays with people; the agent removes the 60 pages of reading that stood in front of that judgment.
Spreading scarce expertise across the team
The deeper change is organisational. Expertise that sat with one or two specialists is now available to the whole booking team, on every purchase order, at any time of day. The specialists stop being a queue and become reviewers of edge cases, which is a far better use of people who understand 800+ aerospace specifications.
This is order intake in its hardest form: high stakes, dense documents, deep domain knowledge. If it works for aerospace surface treatment, it works for your order flow too. Book a demo to see it on your own documents.