Elemica's New Agentic AI Promises to End Decades-Old Supply Chain Bottleneck

WAYNE, Pa. – March 25, 2026 – Digital supply chain provider Elemica today announced a significant expansion of its artificial intelligence capabilities, introducing a powerful new form of AI designed to solve one of the most persistent and costly problems in manufacturing: customer onboarding and order processing.

Building on over six years of experience in applied machine learning, the company is deploying "agentic AI" across its platform. This advanced technology aims to move beyond simple data extraction and analytics, creating autonomous systems that can independently manage and execute complex tasks. The goal is to eliminate the slow, error-prone, and resource-intensive manual work that has long plagued customer service and supply chain teams, enabling them to onboard new clients and process orders with unprecedented speed and scalability.

The Onboarding Quagmire

For global manufacturers, the challenge of customer order digitization remains a critical bottleneck. Orders arrive in a chaotic mix of formats—from structured EDI files to unstructured PDFs, emails, and even faxes. Each new customer or format variation has historically required significant manual effort and heavy involvement from IT departments to configure systems, map data fields, and build integrations. This traditional approach is slow, expensive, and difficult to scale.

This manual process creates a cascade of problems. Onboarding new customers can take weeks or months, delaying revenue and frustrating partners. Existing customer service teams spend an inordinate amount of time manually keying in data and resolving exceptions before an order can even enter the fulfillment workflow. This not only increases the cost-to-serve but also introduces risks of human error, which can impact on-time, in-full (OTIF) delivery performance and slow down cash cycles. The focus of older technologies on simply capturing data, rather than producing clean, execution-ready orders, has left many organizations struggling with fragmented processes and unreliable data.

Enter Agentic AI: A Leap Towards Autonomy

Elemica is tackling this challenge with agentic AI, a more advanced form of artificial intelligence that differs significantly from the more common generative AI. While generative AI excels at creating content in response to a prompt, agentic AI operates as an autonomous agent. It is given a goal—such as onboarding a new customer's order format—and can then reason, plan, and use various software tools to execute the multi-step process required to achieve that objective with minimal human intervention.

Within the Elemica platform, this technology empowers both an expert-led onboarding service, known as Launchpad, and new self-service capabilities. This allows business users, such as customer service representatives, to directly onboard new customers and order formats without needing deep technical expertise or data science support. The system can analyze a new order document, understand its structure, map the relevant fields to the company's ERP system, and create a working configuration for future orders from that customer. This transforms onboarding from a one-off IT project into a continuous, operational capability managed by the business teams themselves.

“Customer service and experience teams need a scalable way to handle every order that comes in, regardless of format or channel, without adding manual effort or complexity,” said Cindi Hane, Chief Product Officer at Elemica, in the company's announcement. “We’re excited to bring self-service onboarding to our customers.”

Quantifying the AI Impact

The business impact of this shift is substantial. Elemica reports that organizations using these new agentic AI capabilities have achieved remarkable results, including reducing customer onboarding time by up to 80 percent and increasing order processing throughput by as much as three times. In early deployments, the company noted that first-time users were able to create fully functional configurations in approximately 30 minutes, with live orders flowing through the system within the same session.

These efficiency gains are being validated by early adopters. “I was really impressed with the Agentic AI Launchpad,” stated Bret L. Bement, Vice President of Supply Chain Management at chemical company OXEA. “Elemica was able to turn around our program and digitize and onboard 30 customers in a very short period, bringing automation and efficiency to our team.” This ability to rapidly digitize a broad range of customers allows manufacturers to extend the benefits of automation beyond their largest, EDI-capable partners to the entire customer base.

Building a Foundation for an AI-Driven Future

The strategic importance of Elemica's approach extends beyond the immediate efficiency gains in order processing. By applying AI to validate, enrich, and structure data at the point of entry, the platform creates what the company calls "AI-ready execution data." This high-quality, consistent, and contextualized data becomes a foundational asset for the entire supply chain.

This clean data foundation powers other advanced capabilities. For example, users of Elemica’s Insights analytics solution now have access to a conversational AI interface. This allows team members to explore their network data using natural language queries—asking questions like "What was our on-time delivery performance for Customer X last quarter?"—and receive instant visualizations and answers without needing to be a data analyst. By generating structured, reliable data at the source, the system paves the way for more accurate predictive analytics, better demand forecasting, and ultimately, more resilient and autonomous supply chain operations.

The expanded AI-driven capabilities are available now as part of Elemica’s Customer Order Orchestration, Launchpad, and Insights solutions.