Order and job status
Where a job is on the floor, what is fabricated, what is scheduled and what is waiting.
Products Vertical glass-industry AI with knowledge, integration and governance
GB8
What happens when a general integration and governance architecture is pointed at one industry. GB8 combines glass-industry knowledge with a customer’s own business data and systems, under the same governance every other RPR deployment carries.
Demonstration product, shown at GlassBuild.
The idea
A vertical product out of a general platform.
GB8 exists to answer a question we get asked constantly: what does your platform actually turn into? This is what it turns into when you point it at one industry and let it learn that industry's real work.
-
Industry knowledge
The vocabulary, products and workflows of a glass business — tempered and laminated units, IG makeup, size bands, the shape of a fabrication schedule. A general assistant has to have all of this explained to it every time.
-
Your business data
Your orders, your inventory, your quotes, your schedule. Not a generic corpus and not last quarter’s export — the current state of the systems you run on.
-
Integrations
Connected to the ERP, the quoting system and the phones through the same integration layer as every other RPR deployment, including the systems with no usable API.
-
Governed AI
Scope, approval thresholds and a traceable record. GB8 can read widely and act narrowly, and everything it does is recoverable afterwards.
-
An assistant that is actually useful in a glass shop
Rather than a chatbot that knows about glass in general and about your business not at all.
Demo
An order desk conversation.
Two questions of the kind that interrupt an order desk all day. Notice what GB8 answers directly, what it refuses to answer at all, and where it stops and asks a person.
Assistant
-
Order desk
What’s the status of the Brookfield Plaza job, and do we have enough 1/4" clear tempered to finish it?
-
GB8
Brookfield Plaza is order 8823 — 14 of 22 units fabricated, balance scheduled for the tempering line Thursday. On stock: 41 lites of 1/4" clear tempered in the size range this job draws from, against 8 remaining units. That covers it, with 33 spare.
- ERP · order 8823 — line status, schedule
- Inventory · Kiln Street — on-hand by size band
-
Order desk
Customer wants to add two more units, same spec. Put it on the quote.
-
GB8
Two units added to quote Q-4471 at the same spec and size as the existing lines. Adding to a quote on an in-production order changes the committed total, so it is held for approval rather than applied — sent to Marcus Ely on the order desk.
Held for approval Write to quote Q-4471 · +2 units · awaiting Marcus Ely
- Quoting · Q-4471 — existing line spec
What GB8 is scoped to do
- Order, job and production status (in scope)
- Stock levels and allocation (in scope)
- Lead times from the schedule (in scope)
- Quote and order line changes, with approval (in scope)
- Code compliance or building-code determinations (explicitly out of scope)
- Structural, safety or glazing suitability rulings (explicitly out of scope)
- Certification or test-standard attestations (explicitly out of scope)
Scope is configuration, set per deployment. Anything outside it is refused and routed to a person rather than answered.
What GB8 does not do
GB8 answers operational questions about your business. It does not make code-compliance determinations, structural or glazing-suitability assessments, safety rulings, or certification and test-standard attestations — and it is configured to refuse those rather than attempt them. Those decisions belong with qualified people, and nothing in this product is intended to substitute for them.
Example workflows
The kind of work it takes off the desk.
These are examples of the workflows GB8 is built around, shown to illustrate the shape of the product. What any given deployment does depends on which systems it is connected to and what scope you set.
Stock and allocation
What is on hand in the size bands a job actually draws from, and whether it covers what is left.
Lead-time questions
What the schedule currently supports, from the schedule itself rather than from a rule of thumb.
Quote assistance
Adding or adjusting lines against an existing quote, held for approval where the committed total changes.
Reorder prompts
Flagging where consumption is running ahead of stock for the sizes a shop moves most.
Front-desk questions
The routine calls that interrupt the order desk all day — answered from live data, escalated when they are not routine.
What changes on the order desk.
GB8 is a demonstration product. We are not publishing time-saved or call-deflection figures for it, because we have not measured them in enough real shops to stand behind a number.
Answering "where is my order" means walking to the floor or calling production.
The current state is answerable from the systems that already hold it.
A general AI assistant has to be told what a laminated IG unit is, every session.
The vocabulary and the workflows are part of the deployment.
An assistant that can act is a risk nobody wants to sign off on.
Actions are scoped, approvals are required where they matter, and everything is recorded.
The wider point
Glass is the example, not the limit.
The reason GB8 is worth showing to someone who has nothing to do with glass is that almost none of it is about glass. The industry knowledge is configuration; the integration, governance and orchestration underneath it are the same platform every other RPR deployment runs on.
Point the same architecture at distribution, manufacturing or field service and the work is in the knowledge and the connectors — not in rebuilding the foundation. That is the argument GB8 exists to make. See the platform underneath →
Start with the customer journey
Saw GB8 at GlassBuild?
The demo is the short version. The useful conversation is about your systems, your order desk and what it would take to connect them.
Prefer email? info@rprtechllc.com