The best place to start with AI is rarely the biggest project on your roadmap. It is usually high-volume manual work full of exceptions, spread across the systems and channels your team already uses. Supply chain leaders are being asked a familiar question: “What is our AI strategy?”

It is tempting to answer with an ambitious, multi-year plan. But the fastest return often comes from work that forces people to switch between carrier portals, email threads, PDFs, phone calls, and legacy systems. Traditional automation works best when the steps are predictable and the data lives in one system. Supply chain work rarely does. BackOps Relay was built to work across that operational mess.

Here are three areas where supply chain teams can create measurable value quickly.

1. Recover more carrier claims

When freight is damaged or lost, your business is often entitled to reimbursement. Recovering that money is another story.

The documentation may be spread across emails, carrier portals, invoices, photos, and internal systems. Filing requirements vary by carrier. Deadlines get missed. Claims are submitted incorrectly or abandoned because the recovery is not worth the time required.

Every unfiled claim means lost margin.

BackOps Relay can gather the required documentation, submit claims through the appropriate channels, and follow them through resolution. Your team spends less time on administration and recovers more of the money it is already owed.

2. Stop chasing order status

“Where is my order?” sounds like a simple question. Answering it often is not. An operations or customer service representative may need to check a carrier portal, search an inbox, contact a vendor, or log in to a legacy system just to provide an update. Multiply that effort across hundreds or thousands of orders, and status checks become a significant drain on the team.

Relay can find shipment information wherever it lives and communicate the answer through the channel that makes sense for the situation. That might mean updating an internal team, replying by text message, or handling a phone call with a customer or carrier.

The experience is not limited to a dashboard or chat window. Relay works across the same channels your customers, vendors, and employees already use. The result is fewer manual lookups, faster answers, higher customer satisfaction, and fewer avoidable escalations.

3. Put inventory where demand is

Carrier claims and order tracking help reduce costs and protect margin. Stock rebalancing can help protect revenue. A product can be available somewhere in your network and still be unavailable to the customer who wants it. When inventory sits in the wrong facility, the business carries the cost while losing sales that may never appear in a report.

Automated stock rebalancing identifies inventory imbalances early and helps teams move stock before a location runs out. This is not only an efficiency improvement. Moving inventory to where demand is helps prevent lost sales and protect revenue.

You do not need perfect data to begin

These workflows have been difficult to automate for a reason. The information is fragmented, inconsistent, and often trapped in systems that do not communicate with one another.

That does not mean you need to wait for a major data cleanup or ERP transformation.

BackOps is designed to work with the operation you have today. Relay can complete workflows across portals, emails, documents, phone calls, and internal systems. It follows your rules, including the exceptions and approval steps that make your business unique. You do not have to redesign your operation to fit the software. Relay works around your operation.

Start with work you can measure

A strong first AI project should solve a real operational problem and produce a result the business can see. Carrier claims, order status tracking, and stock rebalancing are good starting points because the value is clear. You can measure money recovered, hours saved, response times improved, stockouts avoided, and revenue protected. That makes the business case easier to build and the results easier to trust.

Ready to find the right starting point for your operation? Talk to our team to get started.