01 · The Client
A national distributor whose competitive edge lives in the quality of its catalogue and the precision of its stock.
The client is the kind of distributor that runs the country quietly — the cable behind the wall, the switchboard in the riser, the emergency-lighting battery in the corridor. 178 branches. Twelve distribution centres. A catalogue spanning fourteen product categories with 217,000 active SKUs. Revenue in the region of $1.4B AUD.
Their stack was already modern: a cloud ERP for finance and procurement, a product information management layer holding 217,000 master records, a warehouse management system across the twelve distribution centres, a B2B e-commerce platform, and a CRM for trade accounts.
They had already done the obvious automation — quote-to-cash, AP processing, a chatbot on the trade portal. The remaining inefficiencies sat in two places: at the seams between those five systems, and in the long tail of catalogue and inventory work that nobody had ever fully automated because the rules were too specific to be off-the-shelf.
That is where OKOVA came in.
If your operation has this kind of complexity across systems, catalogue depth, or compliance surface, this is worth a conversation.
02 · what was deployed
Standard five-tier governance across the business. A purpose-built vertical layer that understood electrical wholesaling.
OKOVA deployed in two distinct layers. The standard layer governed the business. The vertical layer understood the business. Neither layer could have produced the results alone.
Layer 01 · Standard OKOVA
The five-tier deliberation stack across all business units
Sales operators are bound to CRM and e-commerce. Finance operators across ERP, AR, and AP. Procurement, branch operations, and service — each with their own Tier 1 agents, all routed through the same five-tier governance.
The Reviewers (Auditor, Reckoner, Archivist) bind to every operator. The Stewards (Cartographer, Watchkeeper, Drift Detector) provide the cross-cutting view. The Counsels run adversarial review on material decisions.
The Helm sits with finance, operations, and category management leads as domain holders. Approval-required mode by default. Trust ratcheting per domain.
Layer 02 · Custom Vertical Plane
Six agents engineered for catalogue and inventory in this specific domain
Catalogue Quality Sentinel — continuously audits all 217,000 product records against AS/NZS electrical safety standards. Before OKOVA, this was a quarterly six-week project. It now runs continuously.
Cross-System Reconciler — holds the master truth view across PIM, ERP, e-commerce and WMS. Eliminated a six-FTE rolling reconciliation team.
Inventory Drift Watcher — models stock health across 178 branches. Predicts stock-outs 7–14 days ahead.
SKU Lifecycle Steward — manages new SKU introduction. Cycle time dropped from 14 days to 18 hours.
Supplier Catalogue Ingester — handles approximately 50 supplier catalogue updates per month across Excel, PDF, EDI, and email formats.
Compliance Spec Validator — holds an absolute constitutional rail. A regulated product cannot be sold without valid certification, regardless of trust mode.
"The Compliance Spec Validator stopped us selling 600 units of an RCD which had been revoked three weeks earlier. The supplier had notified by email. Nobody had actioned it. The validator caught it the moment the regulator register updated."
Director of IT & Digital · National Distributor · Electrical & Datacomm Wholesale
03 · What It Delivered
Twelve months of running averages from steady-state operation. Baseline is the year prior to engagement.
Time & Payroll
Quality & Accuracy
Financial Impact
04 · How it was deployed
Trust ratcheted in stages. Custom agents introduced only after the standard layer was load-bearing.
System mapping. Standard OKOVA agents deployed read-only across all business units. Calibration baseline built across all five bound domains.
Three pilot categories, residential lighting, switchgear, and datacomm. Mirror systems running alongside live processes. No live execution.
Standard layer goes live with Helm sign-off per action. Custom Vertical Plane introduced in shadow mode alongside the standard layer.
Vertical agents move to approval-required. Selective autonomous mode for low-risk standard-layer actions, prior recalibration and replenishment recommendations.
Quarterly trust ratchet reviews. CV-06 retains constitutional-rail authority and cannot be autonomous down. All other domains continue ratcheting based on Ledger confidence scores.
05 · why it works
Deep domain expertise inside the constitutional framework. Not outside it.
The argument for the Custom Vertical Plane was not that standard OKOVA was insufficient for the business units, it was not. It was that the parts of the business where competitive position is decided needed agents trained on the supplier behaviour specifically: the AS/NZS electrical standards regime, the supplier behaviour patterns, the seasonal demand curves and lighting and emergency systems, and the certification revocation workflow.
Building those agents inside the OKOVA constitutional framework, rather than as separate AI tools, meant the client never had to choose between deep domain expertise and the audit trail their compliance team required. The vertical agents inherit the constitutional rails. They route through the same Counsels. They write to the same Ledger.
“We had three quotes from horizontal-AI vendors. None of them understood the catalogue. OKOVA was the only proposal that started with our regulation regime and worked outwards.”
Director of IT & Digital · National Distributor · Electrical & Datacomm Wholesale