Buell Motorcycle Co. Accelerates Purchasing With Aptean Intelligence as a Service

At its Grand Rapids, Michigan, facility, Buell Motorcycle Co. manufactures hand-assembled, high-performance motorcycles powered by a proprietary engine and backed by decades of American racing heritage. The company produces multiple models across a range of production volumes, from a high-volume flagship to lower-volume, highly customized variants, with the complete powertrain and vehicle built in-house.

The Challenge 

As a U.S. motor vehicle manufacturer, Buell has to meet homologation requirements that go well beyond what's typical in discrete manufacturing. Every motorcycle is built to an individual work order carrying its own vehicle identification number, and components carry lot codes that Buell has to track for treadwear regulations and potential recalls. That kind of traceability is not optional; it's the foundation the rest of the business runs on.

It's also a big reason why Buell has stuck with Aptean Industrial Manufacturing ERP Intuitive Edition for more than a decade. Purchasing engineer Ed Laban, who consults with Buell today, was part of the original team that selected and implemented the system back in 2013. They were drawn in large part by the solution's ability to handle serial-numbered and lot-identified components, a capability he says few ERP systems can match.

Precision is also critical for Buell's bills of materials, which run up to seven levels deep and include roughly 900 components in the powertrain assembly alone. Every one of those components has to be planned, tracked and purchased correctly. It's a lot of complexity to manage by hand, and a persistent challenge that Buell's purchasing team was facing every day.

A Purchasing Interface That Could Not Keep Up

Buell's purchasing team relies on Aptean Industrial Manufacturing ERP to plan and execute purchasing, but the tool built for that job inside the ERP, Buyer's Workbench, wasn't designed with motorcycle manufacturing's complex bills of materials in mind. Creating a single purchase order meant jumping between screens: reviewing a suggested order, backing out to an item card to make a change and then resetting the system for the change to be reflected. What could have taken two minutes routinely took seven, and the tool would occasionally freeze, necessitating a logging out and back in again.

Complicating matters further, operational data also was not live. If a buyer needed to see how a change rippled through the plan, they had to rerun material requirements planning (MRP), a process that could take up to 30 minutes with the roughly 3,900 active parts Buell was managing at the time.

Multiply that across five models and multiple variants, each with its own multi-level bill of materials, and the math got heavy fast. Some of Buell's team had built workarounds outside the ERP just to get by, which meant less confidence in the system of record and more manual reconciliation.

Procurement manager Amanda Berends, who joined Buell in part to modernize its systems and processes, went looking for a simpler way to work within Buyer's Workbench. That search was the starting point of something bigger. 

The Solution

Buell's original ask was modest: better reporting to replace the manual exports and spreadsheet work the team had been relying on. During that conversation, Aptean suggested a different path: an artificial intelligence (AI) agent built specifically for Buell's purchasing workflow. 

Enter Aptean Intelligence as a Service (AIaaS), a program through which Aptean's AI and industry experts work with customers to create, deploy and optimize agents to solve customers' toughest problems. The AIaaS team set up and shared a demonstration to show what that could look like, and that did more than answer the original question. 

It showed Berends and her team a set of capabilities they hadn't yet imagined. 

“The pre-built AI purchasing agent opened up a lot more opportunity for us than just what we were looking for. And after seeing the demo, everyone here got pretty excited about the opportunity.” - Amanda Berends, Procurement Manager, Buell Motorcycle Co. 

That excitement carried through the build. Aptean's experts worked with Buell's purchasing team to shape an agent around how they actually plan and buy: reading demand from the master production schedule and released work orders; working through Buell's multi-level bills of materials; and surfacing what needs to be purchased and from which vendor. The result is information that is grouped and ready for review.

The Implementation

What stood out to Buell's team was not just what the agent could do, but how Aptean worked with them to get there. The team moved quickly and stayed close to the details.

“It’s been phenomenal from the start. Very organized and knowledgeable. Everyone is very helpful and extremely responsive. As soon as we notify them of something that doesn’t seem right, they get on it, they ask questions, they fix it, and they’re ready to retest within minutes sometimes.” - Amanda Berends, Procurement Manager, Buell Motorcycle Co. 

Laban, who has worked with plenty of outside consulting teams over the years, noticed the same thing from a different angle: a willingness to dig in rather than draw a hard line. 

“They’re not the type that say, ‘Oh, that’s out of scope,’” Laban said. “They push to find ways to do things.”

That collaborative approach helped shape the agent itself. Every purchase order the agent recommends goes to a buyer for review before it's created in the ERP, and every update to a vendor or item record requires the same sign-off.

For a team that had built workarounds precisely because it did not trust its own system, that built-in checkpoint was not a limitation. It was the reason the team could trust the agent from day one.

The Result

With the intelligent purchasing agent in place, Buell's buyers work through a conversational interface instead of clicking between screens within the Buyer's Workbench. The agent reads demand, works through the bills of materials and presents grouped purchasing recommendations by vendor, ready for a buyer to approve.

In practice this means:

• A conversational agent that creates and reviews purchase orders in far fewer steps

• Instant, filtered views of vendors, parts or bills of materials

• Projected time savings of three to four hours a week per buyer

Filtering data is much easier. Rather than combing through a system-generated list that covers every item at once, buyers can ask the agent to narrow in on a specific vendor, part or bill of materials.

“I like using it to analyze data,” John Nychypor, global sourcing specialist at Buell, said. “It combs through all the weeds, the stuff that you don’t really need to pay attention to, so you can really focus on either vendors, parts or bills of materials. It’s very helpful.”

The agent has also identified data issues that had previously gone undetected. For example, while reviewing item data, it surfaced cases where naming was inconsistent for what should have been the same part and then asked the team to confirm whether each case was intentional or worth correcting. That's the kind of detail-level review that is easy to miss in a part database as large as Buell's, and one more way the agent extends the purchasing team's capabilities.

“It’s much smarter than I am as far as detecting anomalies and finding funny stuff in the data,” Laban said. “And it’s bringing a lot of things to our attention that we wouldn’t have otherwise recognized were even out there.”

Buell originally expected the agent to save each buyer three to four hours a week on ordering alone. The team is still exploring the agent's full potential, but Berends said its impact is already proving greater than that first estimate.

“We originally expected this to save each buyer about three to four hours a week for ordering alone. However, this AI agent goes beyond what we originally thought it would do, and it will therefore save the company additional time and money overall.” - Amanda Berends, Procurement Manager, Buell Motorcycle Co.

Ready To Put AI Agents To Work on Your Most Cumbersome Processes?

Most operations have at least one process that takes far longer than it should: the screen-hopping to get a single task done, the spreadsheet someone built because the system couldn't show them what they needed, the data that can't be trusted until the next run finishes. Workarounds like these get the job done, but they sit outside the system of record, which means more manual reconciliation and less confidence in the numbers your team relies on.

AI agents change that. Rather than just reporting on the problem, they take on the repetitive work, reading the data, working through the steps and bringing back recommendations ready for your team to act on.

That’s the kind of problem Aptean Intelligence as a Service was set up to solve. Our AI and industry experts build an agent around the way your team already works, then keep refining it once it's live. And if required, every recommendation can still go to your team for sign-off, so the software takes on the repetitive part of the job while the judgment stays with your people.

Aptean AI agents can run across our full AI platform, AppCentral, which connects the systems your operations already run on. For manufacturers, that starts with Aptean Industrial Manufacturing ERP and extends into the apps around it, so an agent built for one team can draw on data from across your business.

More than the software, our teams stay with you after go-live. As your operations change, the agent changes with them, and the people who built it are the people you'll be talking to when something needs adjusting. You won't be working it out alone.

Want to see what an AI agent built for your team would look like? Request a demo and we'll walk you through it. Or contact us to talk through where an agent would fit in your operations. You can also download this success story as a PDF to share with your team.