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03 · Operational intelligence

Business World

ERP records, shown as an interactive world instead of a dashboard.

Implemented: Experimental build
GENERALRICE_MILL
Paddy lotMilling batchHead rice62%Broken rice8%Bran10%Husk20%

Reverse trace: head rice to its paddy lot

Illustration
Status
Experimental build
Core concepts
  • ERP data modelling
  • Read-only projection
  • Interactive visualization
  • Simulation

Overview

Business World is an experiment in showing a company's operations as a place rather than a dashboard. It projects ERP records, such as products, inventory, and production, into an interactive environment where you can inspect entities and follow how they connect.

It is read-only by design. A projection engine turns the records into the world, and nothing in the world writes back. The data so far is synthetic.

The problem

Dashboards are good at totals and poor at relationships. Which lot went into which batch, and where its outputs ended up, is a question about connections, and tables hide connections.

Industries also differ. A distributor and a rice mill do not share a workflow, so a single fixed model either fits one of them or fits neither.

Architecture

  1. Interactive world

    • Operational inspectors
    • Operational metrics
    • Simulation

  2. Traceability

    • Reverse bill of materials
    • Forward and reverse tracing
    • Yield calculations
    • Recall analysis

  3. Operational profiles

    • GENERAL
    • RICE_MILL

  4. Data

    • Synthetic ERP records
    • Read-only projection engine
Industry behaviour lives in a profile, so the same world can represent a distributor or a rice mill.

What exists, and what doesn't

Implemented

  • Interactive, data-driven visualization of business entities
  • Operational inspectors for examining entities and their relationships
  • Read-only projection engine over synthetic ERP records
  • Simulation functionality and operational metrics
  • Product and inventory relationships
  • GENERAL profile for standard, distributor-oriented workflows
  • RICE_MILL profile: paddy lot tracking, milling batches, and multiple outputs from one process, with its own terminology and KPIs
  • Production yield calculations
  • Forward and reverse lot tracing, with read-only product recall tracing

Planned

Nothing is listed as planned for this project yet.

My role

  • Product concept: representing operations spatially instead of as charts.
  • The profile system and the rice-milling model, including the reverse bill of materials.
  • Implementation was done with AI coding agents working from my specifications. I reviewed the results, set the tests a change had to pass, and decided what was ready.

What I learned

Milling runs the bill of materials backwards

Most manufacturing combines many inputs into one product. Rice milling turns one input, a paddy lot, into several outputs. Modelling that as a reverse bill of materials is what makes yield and lot-level tracing fall out naturally.

Profiles over forks

Industry behaviour is configuration, GENERAL or RICE_MILL, rather than a separate version of the product for each kind of business.

Next · 04

Fox's Shelter

A command center for AI agents, projects, and the machines they run on.