Same ERP. Two front doors.
A ship-supply distributor runs its stock and purchasing in a browser ERP. Head office opens it on fibre; the depot at Port Kestrel opens it on a link that makes every megabyte a decision. This page puts the two front doors side by side: walk the screens yourself on the left, ask the conversational door on the right — same ERP, same live data, same permissions. The meters count screens, clicks, kilobytes and seconds, and the link toggle changes the argument. The third task is a write — and the interesting part is where it stops.
Honest-AI note. No live model call — the conversation replays the assistant's recorded pattern, and every figure on the page is invented for a fictional ERP (the real ones have the same shape, and the shape is the point). What is exact is the boundary: reads are bounded tools over the ERP's own authenticated APIs, permission-checked per user; the write path assembles and validates a draft, and cannot submit it.
Front door one · the browser
Front door two · the conversation
Plain-language key (ERP, bounded read tool, system of record, strangler pattern, feature gate, UOM)
- ERP
- The company's operating system of record — stock, purchasing, receiving, and who may do what.
- Bounded read tool
- A narrow, named query the assistant may call — one item at one location, one list with a hard limit. It cannot browse, join or export the database.
- System of record
- Where the authoritative numbers live. The assistant quotes it; it never becomes it.
- Strangler pattern
- A new interface wrapped around a legacy system, taking over one workflow at a time while the old system keeps running. No big-bang rewrite.
- Feature gate
- A switch that keeps a capability off in production until it is deliberately enabled — here, every write workflow.
- UOM
- Unit of measure. The classic silent killer of purchase documents; here it comes from the item master, never from the chat message.