A short, honest look at where Kyrok stands against its competitors — and the one thing most people who offer to help can’t say: I’ve already built it.
You’re building AI that sits on top of the ERP — SAP, D365, Infor — instead of replacing it, and runs agents across the supply chain while a person keeps the final say. That’s a smart place to start. The big tools either need clean, tidy data or assume a company has already upgraded its systems. Real pharma and chemical mid-sized firms are neither.
What told me you really get the customer wasn’t a feature. It was this:
“We visit production sites where order lists are printed out in the morning, carried into the next room and typed back into another system. The people doing this work are extraordinary, holding disjointed systems together by hand. They deserve tools from this century.” Daniel Hofinger · Founder & CEO, Kyrok
That’s the same problem I’ve been working on — the gap between what the ERP says is true and what’s actually happening on the floor. Everything below comes from that experience.
| Capability | Kyrok | Conexiom | Esker | o9 / Kinaxis | SAP Joule |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vertical to pharma / chemical | |||||
| Built for SMEs, not enterprise | |||||
| Layer over existing ERP, no migration | |||||
| Handles messy / handwritten / unstructured orders | |||||
| Copes with flawed master data | |||||
| End-to-end coordination (sales → planning → procurement) | |||||
| EU data residency + pharma compliance path |
In short: you can’t beat o9 on size or Esker on paperwork, and you shouldn’t try. Your space is the one no one else covers — built for pharma and chemicals, made for mid-sized firms, sitting on top of the ERP instead of replacing it, and able to work with messy data. That’s the column of full dots on the left. It’s hard to copy because it’s the unglamorous work no one else wants to do.
Bottom line: your window is the time before SAP teaches Joule about pharma, and before the big planning tools get cheap. Moving fast and knowing the local market are your real edge — which is why the next modules matter.
Your first module is order intake. Next on your roadmap is production and materials planning — and that’s the harder step:
Order intake is already proving out — AnalytiChem runs around 85% of its orders straight into SAP with no edits, and Konapharma cut complex orders from hours to minutes. Planning is the next thing to make real, and it’s the harder problem.
You describe the goal like this: a raw material is delayed, so procurement is notified, planning adjusts, production reschedules, and the customer email is ready to send in one click. The whole chain turns on planning — it’s the one step that has to decide what to do, not just pass a message along.
And in a regulated supply chain, a wrong decision costs real money. So the planning module comes down to one question: can a planner trust what the AI suggests? That’s also your best answer to SAP Joule — build planning so every decision is clear, easy to check, and signed off by a person. That’s the one thing a generic ERP tool can’t copy. And it’s exactly what I’ve already built.
A stock-planning tool I built for a well-known consumer-electronics and medical-device manufacturer — planning right down to each product.
It’s the same kind of planning module you’re about to build — I’ve already built one, for a tougher customer. Here’s what it does:
No big commitment up front. Here’s a simple, low-risk way to see if I’m the right person to build this:
You’re about to build the planning modules and grow the Berlin team. Planning is where I’ve already done the work, so it’s the natural place to start — but I’m an engineer first, and once we’re working together I’ll build out whatever else needs shipping. Either way, I start delivering features from week one, not ramping up.
I’d rather show you than pitch you. Happy to walk you through what I built and where I’d start.
Mayur Kale · Fractional CTO · London