Glamox's procurement team had a problem hiding in plain sight. Not a shortage of skilled people, and not a shortage of opportunity. Fifty procurement professionals, managing thousands of supplier relationships across Europe. The category managers understood their spend in depth. They knew which price increases to push back on and which suppliers to consolidate. What they didn't have was time - because most of it was going somewhere else entirely.
Glamox makes professional lighting for the world's most demanding places
Glamox is a Norwegian lighting and maritime technology company, supplying luminaires for offshore platforms, ships, hospitals, industrial facilities, and public infrastructure worldwide. Their products go into environments where reliability is not optional. That standard runs through everything they do, including how they buy.
The company manages procurement across multiple manufacturing sites in Europe, with a supplier base spanning thousands of relationships across direct and indirect categories. Complex procurement means complex routines - and routines have a way of consuming the hours the strategic work needs.
Taavi measured what it was actually costing
Taavi, who leads procurement, had a hypothesis he decided to test. He surveyed his top six procurement sites - the sites that account for around 80% of Glamox's spend and order volume - and asked each team a simple question: how much time does the confirmation loop actually cost you every day?
The answers came back from 22 buyers. The average was over an hour per person per day, spent purely on chasing supplier replies and manually entering confirmed data into Infor LN. At some sites, buyers reported spending the better part of their working day on it.
"From what I've learned and determined, they all told me it takes about 3.5 to 4 hours. I agree with that, because it takes me a long time too."
- Buyer, Glamox procurement site
Across the team, the picture was clear: a significant slice of collective capacity was going to work that produced no commercial outcome. It kept orders moving - which mattered - but it left no room for the work that moves costs. Price increase requests arrived from suppliers and got responded to reactively. Consolidation opportunities in the supplier tail went unworked. The gap between what the team knew and what they had time to act on kept widening.
Two agents. The same shift.
Glamox deployed two Riff agents on top of the systems they already ran: Infor LN on-premise, connected via an on-site gateway, with no data leaving the Glamox environment.
The Order Confirmation Agent took over the loop the survey had measured. It reads supplier replies, interprets them against open purchase orders, writes confirmed data back to LN, and surfaces only genuine exceptions - a discrepancy, a delivery date the production schedule can't absorb, a supplier pushing back on terms. What had been over an hour of daily routine per buyer became something that simply ran.
The Cost Avoidance Agent gave category managers like Airika the analytical firepower the strategic work had always needed. When a supplier submits a price increase request, the agent pulls the full picture in minutes: the impact across that supplier's entire order history, which lines are affected and by how much, and the buying patterns on Glamox's side that could reduce the actual cost impact - ordering frequency, lot sizes, consolidation opportunities the team never had time to surface. The category manager steps in ready to negotiate, not scrambling to catch up.
Fifty people, doing what they're actually for
With the confirmation loop off the team's hands, Glamox's procurement professionals are doing what the business hired them to do. Challenging price increases with the analysis to back it up. Consolidating the supplier tail. Building supplier relationships that hold when markets move.
"This is a complete 180-degree shift from everything I have seen before. You are part of a wave that will leave a significant footprint on enterprises over the next decade."
- Terje Lokken, Chief Digital Officer, Glamox
The order confirmation agent was the first loop to go because the survey proved it was costing the most in raw hours. The cost avoidance work is the next chapter - and the team now has the capacity to write it.
*Glamox runs Infor LN on-premise across manufacturing sites in Europe. Riff connects via an on-site gateway with read and write access, with no data leaving the Glamox environment.*