SYSPRO conversational analytics: ask your ERP a question in plain English

Every transaction, every production order, every inventory movement your business has ever made is sitting in your system right now. The problem you have is not a lack of data.

The problem is the path to it. It is having easy access and visibility to your data in order to make well-informed decisions.

Ask your operations manager how long it takes to answer a question about customers or stock. You’ll either hear a number that surprises you (twenty minutes, if they know the system well; longer if they don’t), or a name. Someone who built the report, who knows where to look, who has the login for the right module.

That’s a lot of time burned on questions your ERP already knows the answer to. And when you multiply it across a management team asking five questions a day, you start to see what it’s actually costing.

SYSPRO conversational analytics, delivered through AGx, is what changes that equation.

How most businesses on SYSPRO get their answers today

Before describing what AGx does, it helps to understand the path it replaces.

The traditional path to ERP insight looks like this:

• You need to know which customers haven’t placed an order in 90 days
• You navigate to the right SYSPRO module (if you remember which one)
• You locate or build the relevant report, wait for it to run, and export the results
• You work out what you’re looking at, filter it, and turn it into something you can act on

On a good day, with the right knowledge and a system that behaves, this takes 15–20 minutes. On a day when the report doesn’t exist yet, or the person who built it is unavailable, it takes considerably longer, or it doesn’t happen at all.

The harder version of this problem is the monthly report that lands two weeks after the month ends. By the time your team is looking at the data, the window to act on it has passed. Decisions that should have been made in week two of the month get made in week six, or not at all.

“Every question that takes 20 minutes to answer in SYSPRO is 20 minutes of management time you’re not getting back.”

The access problem is consistent. The pattern is always the same. System configured correctly. Data clean and current. Takes a navigational exercise to get to a full picture. The insight exists; the path to it does not have to be slow.

What AGx changes

AGx is an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server, an AI-generated experience layer that Lancea has built specifically for SYSPRO ERP environments. It replaces the navigation exercise with a conversation.

Your team types or speaks a natural language question. AGx reads it, translates it into the right SYSPRO query, retrieves the live data, and returns an answer, in seconds, from the system your business already runs on.

No report to build. No module to navigate. No SQL to write yourself. No one to call.

The questions that used to require a 20-minute detour through SYSPRO becomes a conversation. Under the hood, AGx evaluates SYSPRO’s available API layer and constructs concurrent SQL queries and business object calls to retrieve precisely what you asked for, without you needing to know that’s happening.

In practical terms, this is AI ERP: intelligence woven into the system your business already runs, not added on top of it.

AGx was built on deep SYSPRO implementation expertise. It understands SYSPRO’s data structure, respects your business object rules, and works within your existing role-based permissions. A user who isn’t authorised to see certain data in SYSPRO is not authorised to see it through AGx either. Your governance framework stays in place: what changes is the interface between your people and the data they’re allowed to access.

Key Takeaway

AGx is a smarter front door to your existing SYSPRO data, not a replacement for the system, and not a workaround for its governance. Your permissions, audit trail, and business rules stay exactly where they are.

What it looks like in practice

The clearest way to show what AGx does is with the questions your management team is already asking, just with the traditional path removed. AGx returns answers in plain language and, where relevant, as visual summaries (charts, breakdowns, comparisons) without you needing to configure a single report.

Scenario 1: Customer account review

“Which customers haven’t placed an order in the last 90 days?”

The traditional path: build or locate a customer transaction report, filter by date range, export, interpret. Fifteen minutes minimum. AGx returns the list before you finish typing.

“Give me a quick overview of this customer: what are they buying and are there any unusual trends this month?”

Two follow-up questions that would previously have required two separate reports. With AGx, they’re only a two-step conversation.

Scenario 2: Sales and stock availability

“Show me my current sales performance, and which items are at risk of stockout?”

This is the question that lives in every operations meeting and usually gets answered with “I’ll pull the report and send it through.” AGx pulls it instantly from live data. Once you can see your top sellers, you ask directly what the stockout risks are and what actions are suggested. AGx analyses current stock levels, identifies at-risk items, and prompts you to act. If you agree, it places the order on the spot.

Scenario 3: Production cost overrun analysis

“Give me a cost overrun analysis across production jobs.”

This is the question that used to require either a report built over hours, a conversation with someone who already knew the data, or a Friday afternoon dedicated to pulling it apart. AGx returns it in seconds and presents it visually. You get a summary view, a breakdown by job, expected versus actual cost comparison, and detailed job-level analysis, all in one response, all from live data.

Speed is one half of it, decision quality is the other half. When the answer to a question arrives in seconds rather than hours, you ask more questions. You catch things earlier. You stop making decisions on data that’s two weeks stale because current data is finally as easy to access as stale data used to be.

Beyond retrieval: when AGx takes action

SYSPRO conversational analytics is one part of what AGx does. The other part is even more significant.

Where an action falls within a user’s existing SYSPRO permissions, AGx can execute it directly, through SYSPRO’s API, with the same governance controls that apply to any manual transaction. This includes approving requisitions, creating purchase orders, and updating existing orders: any action the user is authorised to perform manually.

“Create a purchase order for 20 units of [item].”

AGx processes this instruction through SYSPRO’s business logic. The purchase order is created with the same rules, approvals, and audit trail that would apply if a user had navigated to the module and done it manually. The speed changes. The controls don’t.

Important

AGx executes transactions through SYSPRO’s existing governance layer, not around it. Business object rules, approval workflows, and audit requirements remain fully intact. If a user isn’t authorised to create a purchase order manually, AGx will not create one on their behalf.

The intelligence lives in the conversation layer; the governance lives where it always has.

What this means for your bottom line

The ROI case for AGx starts with a simple question: what does management time cost in your business?

If a senior operations manager or production director spends 20 minutes per ERP query, five times a day, that’s over an hour and a half of senior capacity spent navigating a system rather than running the business it’s meant to support. Across a management team of four or five people, that’s six to eight hours a day, not spent on decisions, on relationships, or on the kind of operational judgement that can’t be delegated.

AGx doesn’t eliminate that time entirely. Not every question takes 20 minutes, and not every question will route through a conversational interface. But it removes the access friction from the questions that shouldn’t require a navigation exercise in the first place, and in our experience, those questions represent a significant portion of the daily ERP interaction in most manufacturing businesses.

The second dimension of the ROI case is decision quality. When live data is as easy to access as a monthly report used to be, the business stops making decisions on yesterday’s information. That shift, from lagging indicators to current data, compounds. Faster inventory decisions, earlier customer risk signals, production performance analysis that informs this week’s scheduling rather than next month’s retrospective.

How we built it

Lancea’s ability to bring AGx to SYSPRO clients is the direct result of what the Lancea team has accumulated across many implementations: deep knowledge of how SYSPRO environments are structured, where the data lives, how it’s governed, and where the access gap bites hardest in manufacturing operations.

SYSPRO does what it was built to do: capture every transaction, enforce business rules, and hold your operational data with precision. AGx is the layer that sits on top, designed to give the people who need that data direct access to it, without needing to know where it lives or how to retrieve it.

It works best where the underlying ERP implementation is solid: a well-configured SYSPRO environment is what gives the conversational layer above it its value.

This is what AI for manufacturing looks like when it is built on ERP implementation depth rather than generic AI capabilities.

The next step

If your management team is navigating SYSPRO for answers and finding the feedback loop frustrating, the right starting point is not a product evaluation. It is a conversation about your specific environment: what your data looks like today, where the access friction is costing you the most, and what it would take to put a conversational layer on top of it.

AGx is available for anyone already running SYSPRO. And because it’s built by the team that implemented your system, the conversation starts from a position of already knowing what’s inside it.

Talk to the Lancea team about AGx, or learn more about what it looks like in your environment.