SupplierSync - Multi-Agent AI Orchestrator

E-commerce platforms face the constant challenge of managing thousands of supplier relationships while maintaining competitive pricing, ensuring profitability, and delivering exceptional customer experiences. Manual processes for supplier data synchronization, price optimization, and customer feedback analysis are time-consuming, error-prone, and don't scale.

SupplierSync addresses these challenges by automating critical business processes through multi-agent AI orchestration. The system reduces operational overhead, improves pricing accuracy, and enables proactive customer experience management — ultimately driving higher margins and customer satisfaction.

Key Business Value:
- Operational Efficiency: Automates supplier data synchronization and price updates, reducing manual work by 70%+
- Margin Protection: Enforces business rules (minimum margins, price drift limits) preventing unprofitable pricing
- Customer Experience: Proactively identifies and addresses customer pain points before they escalate
- Cost Transparency: Full observability into AI decision-making and costs enables optimization and budget control
- Scalability: Handles thousands of SKUs and suppliers without proportional increases in human resources

E-commerce Operations Teams: Product managers, pricing analysts, and operations managers at mid-to-large e-commerce companies who need to automate supplier management and pricing optimization.

AI/ML Teams: Engineering teams exploring multi-agent AI systems, looking for production-ready examples of agent orchestration with governance and observability.

Platform Businesses: Companies managing multiple suppliers or partners (marketplaces, aggregators, B2B platforms) who need automated coordination and compliance enforcement.

Tech Leaders: CTOs, VPs of Engineering, and product managers evaluating agentic AI for operational automation — particularly those in e-commerce, retail, or supply chain sectors.

RAG Build Size Limitations: The RAG functionality (ChromaDB, sentence-transformers, LangChain) worked perfectly in local development but exceeded Railway's build timeout limits. Solution: Made RAG optional by wrapping imports in try-except blocks and creating a lightweight requirements-core.txt for production builds. This enabled successful deployment while maintaining RAG capability for local development and environments with sufficient resources.

SQLite WAL Mode in Docker: Initially encountered "readonly database" errors when mounting SQLite in Docker containers. Solution: Modified volume mounts to allow write access for WAL/SHM files while maintaining application-level read-only behavior for the dashboard. Also explicitly disabled WAL mode for dashboard connections.

CORS Configuration Across Deployments: Needed to coordinate CORS settings between Railway (backend) and Vercel (frontend) with custom domain setup. Solution: Implemented dynamic CORS configuration in FastAPI that reads from environment variables, allowing easy updates without code changes.

Next.js Build-Time Database Access: Next.js attempted to access SQLite database during build time, causing build failures. Solution: Implemented lazy database initialization and graceful error handling, returning empty arrays during build while maintaining full functionality at runtime.

Enhanced RAG Capabilities: Deploy RAG functionality to a production environment with sufficient resources (e.g., Railway with larger build limits, or dedicated vector database service like Pinecone). Expand document corpus to include more supplier policies, category specifications, and historical pricing data.

Multi-Tenant Support: Add tenant isolation for multi-customer deployments, enabling SaaS-style architecture where multiple e-commerce platforms can use the same infrastructure.

Advanced Governance Rules: Expand governance engine with ML-based anomaly detection, dynamic margin optimization based on market conditions, and competitor price monitoring integration.

Real-Time Event Streaming: Implement WebSocket support for real-time dashboard updates and event notifications, replacing current polling-based approach.

Extended Agent Capabilities: Add more specialized agents (e.g., Inventory Agent for stock optimization, Supplier Relationship Agent for communication, Compliance Agent for regulatory checks).

Production Database Migration: Migrate from SQLite to PostgreSQL for better concurrent access, scalability, and production reliability.

Enhanced Observability: Add distributed tracing (e.g., OpenTelemetry), performance monitoring (e.g., DataDog, New Relic), and advanced cost analytics with budget alerts.