For software and AI vendors
Forward-deployed engineers who know how your customers' business runs.
You sell an ERP add-on, a production or quality system, a procurement, warehouse or logistics tool, or AI that processes invoices, orders and deliveries, to companies that make, move or sell goods. We join your team, work out with you which use cases your customers will pay for, build them, and check what your product produces against how their business really runs.
What the service is.
We work inside your team, on your product and with your customers. The work usually covers:
- Choosing the use cases worth building. Which problems in your customers' business have an answer they will pay for and sign off, and which are better left to a spreadsheet.
- Building them. We write production code with your engineers, in your product.
- Setting the test. Acceptance criteria and test cases your customer's people would actually check: month-end cut-off, intercompany sales, a batch that was reworked, a partial delivery, an invoice that matches neither the order nor the delivery, stock moved between two warehouses.
- Checking the output against the real business. How a ledger, a plant or a warehouse actually behaves, which is often different from what the documentation says.
- On your side of the table. When your customer's finance director, head of operations or head of supply chain pushes back, we answer without needing a briefing first.
- Helping it stick. Working with your customer on the routines that have to change for the software to be used after go-live.
Where we know the business.
We know how manufacturing, FMCG and consumer-goods companies run across all of their key processes, well beyond the finance function: operations and production, procurement and supply chain, sales and key accounts, new product development, demand planning and S&OP, revenue management and pricing, human resources, finance and strategy. We have built software for each of them ourselves, so we know where a use case gets tested and what a customer is likely to question.
You have probably heard some of these.
- “The demo went well. Then their group controller asked how we handle intercompany, and the room went quiet.”
- “Their controller asked why our goods-received figures don't match the ledger at month-end, and nobody on our side could answer.”
- “We can't tell whether the output is right, so we can't tell the customer it is.”
- “The pilot produced a number that disagrees with their ledger, and now the whole project is under review.”
- “We're building the feature the loudest customer asked for, and we can't tell whether it's the one worth building.”
- “Our engineers are excellent, and none of them has ever closed a month or signed off a stock count.”
How the work is shaped.
There are three usual shapes. Each is scoped with you and quoted per engagement, in writing, before anything starts, and the scope names what you keep.
Use-case sprint. We rank the use cases with your product team, check the data each one needs, and write each one up with its tests, ready to build. You keep the specifications and the tests.
Built and tested. We take the most valuable use case through to something your customer's people use: built with your engineers, passing its tests, with the controls around it. You keep the working feature and the tests behind it.
Customer rollouts. As your customers go live, we keep the tests current and check your product's output for each new customer.
How we work with you.
- Remote-first. We work in your tools and join meetings by video, booked ahead. On site by arrangement.
- We check before we say yes. When we tell your customer a figure is right, it is because we have checked it.
- Your team owns the model. Your engineers and data scientists own the model and how it is trained. We make sure the answers it gives would stand up in front of a finance director or a head of supply chain.
- We work as an independent company alongside your team, and your customer knows who we are.
- Your customer's data stays in their hands. We work with it only as far as the scope and your contract with them allow, and we never use it to train models.
Send us the use case you are least sure about.
Bring the deal that stalled, or the output you can't verify, and we'll tell you plainly how we can help.
Tell us about your product and the customers you sell it to — we want to hear it.
Or email support@mistlight.eu
What to put in your first message
- What your product does, and who inside your customer has to approve it
- The pilot or the deal that stalled, and where it stalled
- Which of the three shapes fits, if you already know
- A short description is enough to start