YOUR OBJECTIVE COMES FIRST
Order-entry feasibility
Choose a useful first investment, with a reason to proceed.
Montana Commerce identifies manufacturing, agriculture and ag technology, B2B technology, life sciences, back-office operations and logistics among its key industries. A useful scoping example is distributed field-service scheduling. Follow a site reference, travel requirement and task-readiness checklist through the work with field coordination, service specialists and site contacts. A scheduled visit can fail if equipment access or required parts are not confirmed before travel. Which readiness checks must be complete before a field visit is scheduled?
Montana Department of Commerce: industry context ↗01Start with a decision or recurring task
Identify who does the work, what they need from the output and what happens when it is wrong. Compare an AI approach with configuration, rules or a process change. An assessment should explain the problem worth solving before proposing a model or a tool.
02Check the information the idea depends on
Review representative documents, source permissions, record quality and access to existing systems. Identify missing inputs and the person authorized to resolve them. A large document collection is not automatically a usable knowledge base, and a system login is not the same as an approved integration. Working example: A sample order, product mapping and exception log.
03Build a baseline people can inspect
Record current handling time, review effort, error types and transaction volume. Estimate operating costs alongside implementation and support. Use a small evaluation set to test the proposal against this baseline, including incomplete records and cases where the system should stop for help. For distributed field-service scheduling, agree how field coordination, service specialists and site contacts contribute where those functions are involved.
04Agree on who can approve the next step
Name the business sponsor, process owner, technical reviewer and people who will use the result. Set a bounded pilot, acceptance criteria and a stop decision. The roadmap should make dependencies visible rather than turn every possible use case into an immediate commitment. Review check: The pilot separates accepted lines from unresolved matches.