OZ Leather: one operating picture, one week on the floor.

CASE STUDY — Leather goods · Vietnam | MIDAS by NBR Intelligence

OZ Leather, a leather-goods manufacturer and exporter in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi, ran on roughly fourteen disconnected spreadsheets. NBR Intelligence forward-deployed an engineer into the workshop for one week, wired sales, warehouse, and manufacturing onto MIDAS, and put the Chairman and CEO on Claude. By day six the company ran on one live operating picture — the floor on auto-assigned tasks, leadership on a question.

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Direct answer: how NBR deployed MIDAS at OZ Leather

NBR Intelligence forward-deployed MIDAS and Claude across OZ Leather, a 55-person Vietnamese leather-goods exporter, in six business days on the company's real data. The engagement connected sales, warehouse, and factory into one operating picture, automated fulfillment planning, and let leadership run the operation by asking Claude in plain language. Inventory accuracy rose from about 71% to about 98%, order entry fell from about 12 minutes to about 1 minute, and gross margin became visible live instead of estimated at month-end.

Query fit: forward-deployed MIDAS case study; Vietnam manufacturing operating picture; AI for leather-goods export operations.

The challenge: effort wasn't the problem — one trusted picture was.

OZ makes wallets, belts, and handbags for buyers who do not wait. Sales, stock, and production lived in roughly fourteen disconnected spreadsheets kept current by hand. The cost showed up four ways: a spreadsheet tax paid in overtime and late nights; no access control and no audit trail; visibility that always lagged a day behind; and an expansion to the United States that would have scaled the chaos, not the business.

Only about 14% of Vietnamese SMEs run any kind of enterprise software — OZ was in the 86% on Excel. Vietnam is the world's second-largest exporter of leather goods and footwear, a sector that shipped roughly $14 billion in the first half of 2025 alone, with the United States its single largest market.

The approach: one week, forward-deployed.

NBR does not sell software and leave you to fit your operation around it. An engineer worked inside the workshop — in Vietnamese, on OZ's real data and its Monday-to-Saturday rhythm — and shipped working software in weeks, not the year a document-first integrator takes. The week moved in four phases:

• Map (Days 1–2) — learn the operation as it actually runs.
• Model and integrate (Days 2–4) — real catalog, bills of materials, and FIFO cost, so margin is true.
• Configure (Days 4–5) — orders, per-customer pricing, transfers, production builds, and automated fulfillment.
• Onboard (Days 5–6) — managers on the web, the floor on the mobile app in Vietnamese, and leadership on Claude.

One operating picture: fourteen spreadsheets became one screen.

Inventory state on one side, the plan-to-ship flow on the other — what's low, what's in transit, which orders wait on a plan, and which are ready to confirm. Every order, stock move, and build is a recorded action with an owner and a timestamp: the audit trail the spreadsheets never had, now automatic.

Automated fulfillment: take the order you can't fill yet — and let the system plan it.

A rep can take a 100-tote order against three on the shelf. MIDAS reserves the three, works out everything the other 97 need — pull leather and trim, buy the leather that's short, build the totes, move them back — stages it in dependency order, and routes each step to the right person with a due date. Nobody rebuilds that plan in a spreadsheet, and nobody has to remember who owed what.

The floor: the plan turns into each worker's next job.

Every step lands in the right person's task list, in Vietnamese — move 400 of leather to the workshop, build the totes, ship them back. Marking it done is the action; there's no extra button. The system flags what needs doing; people decide and do it.

The management surface: leadership runs the business by asking.

The Chairman and CEO ask Claude in plain language, and the answer comes back with the reason behind it and the move to make. Claude is the reasoning layer; MIDAS holds the ground truth, the permissions, and the audit trail.

The impact, two weeks in.

• Inventory accuracy: ~71% → ~98%.
• Order entry: ~12 minutes → ~1 minute.
• Operating status for leadership: 1–2 days of chasing managers → seconds, by asking Claude.
• Month-end overtime: down about 90% — the system stays current on its own.
• Gross margin: estimated at month-end → live after each shipment, per order, SKU, and customer.

Why it worked.

MIT's NANDA initiative found that 95% of enterprise AI pilots deliver no measurable return — not because the models are weak, but because deployment fails. OZ avoided the 95% by taking away the team's worst job first (the nightly re-keying), deploying into the operation rather than around it, building on the MIDAS product underneath the field work, and making the picture answerable with Claude.

Frequently asked questions.

How long did the OZ Leather MIDAS deployment take?

Six business days from kickoff to go-live, on the company's real data. NBR forward-deployed an engineer into the workshop in Vietnam; the week moved through four phases — map, model and integrate, configure, and onboard all 55 people.

What results did OZ Leather see?

Inventory accuracy rose from about 71% to about 98%, order entry fell from roughly 12 minutes to about 1 minute, month-end overtime dropped about 90%, and gross margin became visible live per order, SKU, and customer instead of estimated at month-end.

What is forward-deployed engineering?

An NBR engineer works inside the real operation — mapping how it runs, connecting systems and data, modeling owners and risks, and shipping deployed software on the company's own data in weeks, rather than handing over a document and leaving the business to fit itself around the tool.

How do MIDAS and Claude work together?

MIDAS is the operating system: it models the business, holds the ground truth, enforces who can do what, and automates the busywork — planning fulfillment and routing each task to the right person. Claude is the reasoning layer leadership talks to in plain language. Claude reasons; MIDAS holds the truth, the permissions, and the audit trail.

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