AI agency Tilburg: automating processes in logistics and manufacturing

What kind of companies sit in Tilburg

Tilburg is a working city, and you hear it in the questions that come from here. They are rarely about strategy and almost always about volume: many orders, many documents, many manual steps per day.

An international layer runs through much of it: foreign-owned logistics operations, warehousing run for European clients, production teams where the language on the floor is not Dutch. Sessions, reports and training in English are normal for us. One caveat: several Dutch systems we connect to offer their interface only in Dutch, so some screens stay Dutch whatever we build around them. We say which ones before we start.

Roughly five groups come up most often.

• Logistics and distribution. Hauliers, warehousing and fulfilment in the large sheds on the business parks ringing the city. Many clients, each with their own way of sending work in.
• Manufacturing and supply. Metalworking, machine building, assembly and maintenance. Strong on engineering, thin on administration.
• Plastics and technical textiles. The city’s textile history largely moved into technical applications and plastics. Customer-specific work, short runs, a lot of quoting.
• Construction and installation. Crews on site daily, with job sheets, materials lists and planning corrected over the phone.
• Family businesses across all of the above. Second or third generation, grown without anyone ever writing a process down.

Which work gets left undone here

The question is never whether AI can do something, but which work comes back every week, is done by a person, and does not really call for judgement. In Tilburg that sits strikingly often in the paperwork around goods.

In logistics and distribution it is about intake. One client sends a spreadsheet, the second a PDF, the third an email with the instruction buried in the text. Someone in the office turns that into a transport order or an inbound booking by hand. The work is not hard, it is simply never finished, and during a peak it is the bottleneck. On top of that: waybills and proofs of delivery scanned, renamed and hunted down per trip when a customer calls.

In manufacturing and plastics it sits in the quotation. A request arrives with a drawing or a bill of materials, someone works through it, looks up the parts and types the calculation out again. For short runs that is half a day, and most of those quotes are never won.

In construction and installation it sits with the job sheet: the crew hands it in, someone retypes it, and invoicing runs a structural week behind. Almost everyone shares one more: questions about lead time or status where the answer lives in three systems and in one person’s head.

Family businesses: the process lives in someone’s head

Tilburg has many companies that have been in the same family for generations. That gives you people who know exactly how it works, and at the same time the biggest obstacle to automation.

In a firm like that, the way of working is rarely written down. The planner knows which customer you never schedule on a Friday, the estimator knows which supplier you always ring to confirm a price, the bookkeeper knows which invoice has to pass the director first. Ask how the process runs and you get three answers from three people, all three correct.

We will not build on top of that until it has been written out. That is what the core session is for: half a day walking the floor, counting the steps and getting the exceptions on the table. In a family business that is often the first time the process exists on paper. Even if you build nothing afterwards, you keep that.

A warning belongs with it. If all the knowledge sits with one person who is heading for retirement, automation stops being an efficiency question and becomes a continuity one. That is more urgent than most directors think, and it does not solve itself.

Visiting Tilburg: no office here, but close by

We will not dress it up: we have no office in Tilburg. No address in the Spoorzone, no nameplate on a business park. Anyone claiming a branch in every town usually has a PO box.

What we do have is our Eindhoven base, where our founder works two days a week — about forty-five minutes’ drive away. That makes this an easy region: we schedule a visit for a day we are in Brabant anyway, usually within the same week or the one after.

• Intro call: by video, or at your office if you would rather see someone first. Half an hour.
• Core session: on your shop floor, a half-day of 4 hours. At this distance a half-day works fine; no need to block out a full day, unless you want several processes looked at in one go.
• During the build: short catch-ups by video. A progress conversation does not need to be in person, and that saves you travel costs.
• A visit as soon as there is something to see or test, and at handover we sit next to the people who will use it.
• Travel costs: €0.45 per kilometre from wherever we set off. For Tilburg that is normally Eindhoven, not Bussum, which makes a considerable difference. It appears as a separate line on the invoice, with no mark-up.

What it costs

Our rates are the same everywhere and do not change per town or per client. Only the kilometres differ, and here they work in your favour.

• AI scan: free, five minutes online. You get a score, a few concrete opportunities and a first price indication. No sales pitch.
• Core session on your shop floor: half-day of 4 hours, €596 excluding VAT and travel costs. A full day is €1,192. Our advisory hourly rate is €149.
• Building: €110 per hour for straightforward work, €165 per hour for complex development. Paid monthly in advance from a budget you set, so there is no open end.
• Travel costs: €0.45 per kilometre from Eindhoven.
• Running costs: what the AI models and connected services cost per month once it is live. That scales with your volume, and we work it through beforehand.
• A subsidy partner checks as standard whether any scheme applies. If none does, you hear that too.

Where it goes wrong

Four things come back again and again at companies in this corner. None of them is about AI, and three sit on your side of the table.

• No owner. The director finds it interesting, the planner is too busy, and the project disappears behind the day job. By far the most common cause, and extra stubborn in a business that runs on volume.
• Data that does not add up. The same customer twice, addresses in a free-text field, three part numbers for one product. Cleaning up is dull manual work and often the bulk of the first weeks.
• A package that keeps its door shut. Some transport, warehouse and ERP systems have no open interface, or release one only on a pricier subscription. We check that before building; sometimes the answer is that another process goes first.
• Automating what your client will change next month. In logistics the way a customer sends work in shifts regularly. Build for one fixed layout and you stall at the first change, so we deliberately leave more slack even though that costs a little more up front.

How to start

The order is deliberately unexciting, and you can stop after any step.

1. 01Do the free AI scan. Five minutes online, no sales pitch.
2. 02Book an intro call. By video or at your office. Half an hour, in which we work out whether an on-site session would produce anything. If not, we say so.
3. 03Core session on your shop floor in Tilburg. Half-day of 4 hours, €596 excluding VAT plus travel costs. We follow one or two processes end to end, talk to the people doing the work and count the steps.
4. 04Core report with priorities and a go or no-go per opportunity. It is yours and stands on its own; take it to your own IT partner if you like.
5. 05Build, if you want to. The same people who ran the session, at the fixed hourly rates, paid monthly in advance.

Frequently asked questions

What we do here

Further reading

Other regions

Start with the free AI scan

Five minutes online, no sales pitch: you get a score, concrete opportunities and a price indication. If you are in Tilburg and would rather meet first, just book it in — it is about forty-five minutes from Eindhoven, so getting to you is rarely a problem.