Each part of Melbye runs well. Logistics prices the freight, procurement buys the parts, product sets the prices, and the people doing it know their work. But a distributor's margin is made across all three at once, in how a part is bought, moved and priced together. And as the business grew, with more items, more suppliers and two countries, that full picture became harder for any one person to hold. The savings were real. They were just spread across more of the chain than anyone had time to see at once.
For a distributor, the value chain is the product
A manufacturer's value chain supports its product. For a distributor, the value chain *is* the product. Melbye buys materials for critical infrastructure: power, data, mobility, building and safety. It sells them on across Norway and Sweden, and how well it buys a part, moves it, and prices it is not back-office support. It is where the margin is made.
And those three decisions are really one. How you size an order is a buying decision and a freight decision. What a part costs to land depends on both. The best moves come from seeing all of it together, and across thousands of items and a growing supplier base, seeing all of it together is exactly what no single person has the hours to do.
The day goes to keeping things moving
A freight quote took a day to build by hand. Someone had to look up each item, work out pallets and loading meters and weight, and price it against the carrier, while the customer waited for a number. On the buying side, Olof, who leads procurement, ran a time study on the routine work and found about a day in five going to it.
"We did a time study on how much we spend on these tasks per week: chasing order confirmations, updating the system, splitting order lines. It's around ten hours a week. It works, but it takes a lot of time, and it's easy to miss things."
Olof Karlsson, Procurement, Melbye
On the product side it was the same in another form. Pricelists arrive in every format, and the question that sets margin, whether an increase is worth pushing back on, takes real time to answer well. The work all has to happen, and it kept the chain moving. It just left little room to step back and look at the chain as a whole.
Where the savings were hiding
When Melbye looked at the data across the whole chain, some of the largest opportunities turned out to be the kind no single view could catch.
One article made it concrete. The same part was being bought at a wide price range, not from any supplier increase, but from how the orders were sized. Smaller top-up orders paid a higher unit price, while larger orders on the same contract paid much less. And order size isn't only a buying call; it's a freight call too, a full load against a half. The opportunity sat across buying and logistics together, where it takes both to see it.
There was more. Norway was sourcing that part internally from Melbye's own Swedish operation, and the same ordering pattern carried over, so the saving was available on the internal flow as well. A supplier's flat-looking increase turned out to be mostly a copper pass-through in a handful of items, better met with a focused negotiation than a blanket acceptance. And a few hundred parts with no movement in a year were still being carried as active. None of it was hidden by anyone. It was simply spread across more of the chain than a busy week leaves time to assemble.
"This is what the cost work is showing: how intertwined and linked we are in the value chain. You can only learn this by trying, and looking for the value."
Hege Nordahl, Melbye
One chain, one view
Riff didn't replace anything. The agents sit on top of the systems Melbye already runs: Dynamics, the shared mailboxes, the supplier pricelists. There is no migration and no new platform to learn. What they add is the view the chain never had time to build, the same data in one place, so a buying decision can see the freight, a freight plan can see the buy, and a price can see both. Every action runs through a human gate, nothing is written on its own, and all three were built alongside the team.
The Order Confirmation Agent keeps the buy-side current. It reads each supplier reply, matches it to the purchase order line by line, drafts the accepted update straight into Dynamics, and follows up on anything still open past the 48-hour mark, bringing forward only the lines that don't match: a price that moved, or a delivery date the schedule can't absorb. The day-in-five that went to routine now largely runs on its own, and the buyers spend it on the cases where judgment changes the outcome.
The Cost Avoidance Agent does the cross-chain analysis there was never time for. When a pricelist lands or an increase arrives, it pulls the whole picture in minutes: the impact across the supplier's order history, parts with no recent demand, and the ordering patterns that affect unit price. An opportunity like the one above surfaces early, with the case already built. The question that used to wait now gets answered before the call.
The Freight Quote Agent makes the load, and the buy behind it, visible. It reads a request, looks up every item in Dynamics, plans the load down to a 3D model of the packed trailer, prices it against the carrier, and drafts the quote for a person to send. A day of work comes back as a few minutes of review. And the same consolidation the cost agent flags as a price win is the consolidation that fills the trailer.
Seeing the whole chain at once
Two things come back together: the hours, and the wider view. The buyer who had a day in five tied up in routine spends more of it now on the negotiations that set margin. The product side can act on opportunities as they appear: a single article worth roughly 85,000 SEK a year, surfaced in three minutes. And decisions that used to be made one node at a time can be made across the chain, buying in the quantity that earns the freight, pricing a part knowing what it truly costs to land.
"This kind of work should be fun, exciting, something you learn from. Not an irritation that eats the day."
Gunnar Huynh, Product, Melbye
This is only the start. The first agents took the loops that cost the most time for the least judgment: a freight quote, a confirmation, a price check. A distributor's chain has many more, all connected. Each one an agent takes adds another part of the chain the team can see across. The aim isn't a team that reacts faster. It's a distributor that plans the buy and the shipment as one, and gets to decide what to buy before the supplier sends a thing.