From 30 minutes to 30 seconds per invoice

Sucafina has been trading green coffee for generations. The family-owned business is based in Geneva, employs more than 1,500 people and works across 42 countries, buying coffee at origin and getting it onto boats bound for roasters around the world.

In its Nairobi finance hub, entering a single invoice used to take about 30 minutes. With a Lua agent, it takes about 30 seconds.

That is the headline. The more interesting story is why it mattered so much, and what Sucafina did next.

A business built on cents

Coffee trading is old, fiercely competitive and has thin margins. Buyers don’t feel much loyalty to whoever ships their beans. If you’re a few cents cheaper, you win the business. If you’re a few cents dearer, you lose it.

So every minute of manual work is a cost that shows up in the price. And there was plenty of manual work. Like much of the industry, Sucafina runs on systems built decades ago. Trust is low across the trade, so paperwork gets collected by one person and checked by another.

Ivo Sarjanovic joined Sucafina after nearly a decade in tech. He spent his first stint in Kenya as a trader and quickly saw how much could run differently. When the regional leadership came across Lua, Ivo and the Lua team sat down together, listed five or six processes worth fixing and ranked them by what was actually feasible.

Four agents, four very different jobs

Invoices. Sucafina’s centre of excellence in Nairobi processes invoices for the whole region. Many arrive from Uganda as photos of paper documents, poorly structured and inconsistent. Someone had to read each one, copy it into another system and work out the tax, which changes depending on the type of cost. Now the agent reads the invoice, pulls out the fields, applies the right tax treatment and gets it ready for the team to check. Thirty minutes became thirty seconds.

Market intelligence. Coffee prices are notoriously opaque. As Ivo puts it: “You pick up the phone, ask someone for a price, and you’re always unsure if you’re getting a good one.” Traders now forward competitors’ PDF price lists to an agent that parses and organises them. That is harder than it sounds. Kenya alone has around 15 coffee grades, and every company names them slightly differently. The agent maps them onto a common scale, so traders can ask things like “what are Kenyan prices landed in Rotterdam?” or “flag me any price for this grade in this port.”

Samples. Every buyer wants a physical sample first, and every country and client has its own rules: phytosanitary certificates, bean density, defect counts. Requests used to bounce between traders, the quality team and a client in Japan who would only reply the next day. Now anyone can ask the agent to send a sample, it asks the right follow-up questions upfront, and the quality team wakes up to a dashboard showing exactly what to prepare. Everyone stays in the loop as the sample moves.

Company policy. A simple agent answers staff questions about Sucafina’s policies. The colleague who used to field every one of those questions by hand has written up how much it changed his working week, and plans to present it to the board.

Messy underneath, simple on top

None of this was a neat plug-in job. The Uganda invoices are images, not tidy data. Price lists come in every format, using every naming convention. The most ambitious idea on the original list hit the limits of Sucafina’s legacy systems, and getting the agents right took some real back and forth over the summer.

That complexity is Lua’s problem, not the user’s. For a finance clerk, a trader or a quality lead, the experience is just this: send the thing, ask the question, get the answer.

The best review is a queue

Ivo’s favourite signal isn’t applause. “They come back asking for more types of invoices,” he says. “I take that as a good sign.”

The invoice agent started with one type of invoice from one country. The finance team now wants it for more. What began in Kenya is being lined up for a wider rollout across Sucafina.

What comes next

Ivo has a bigger picture in mind. He thinks companies will increasingly judge people by how well they direct agents, and that the industry’s core trading platforms will need to be rebuilt to work with them.

Sucafina isn’t waiting for that. One invoice, one price list, one sample at a time, it’s already working that way.

Published with Sucafina’s permission. Figures are Sucafina’s own.