The Operating System of a Business: How I Built a Governed AI Agentic Platform on Legacy SAP

How I built a governed agentic platform across sales, engineering, manufacturing, stock, procurement and finance, on an ERP with no API

Companion talk deck

The full 90-slide deck that goes with this piece is at the end of the post, or open it now: khanmjk.github.io/syntell-bizops-portfolio/deck.

When I joined Syntell in September 2025, to run the business of Intelligent Traffic Systems, I had zero knowledge of the traffic systems domain, products and services - and no experience in public sector customers. As someone who spent 25 years in the high-tech software & hardware industry (mostly in video technology from 2000-2020, and then later 2021-2025 with AWS cloud services), this change was all very new to me. Being the business owner, I found myself responsible and accountable for profit & loss of a fully fledged technology business, covering Sales & Marketing, Tender Administration, Contracts Management, Finance, HR People Operations, Manufacturing & Assembly, Supply Chain Management, Warehousing, Shipping & Logistics, Product & Technology Engineering, Field Technical Services and Customer Support. I had in the past managed very large programs that spanned all these areas, but I was never truly the owner for an enterprise until now. 

Getting up-to-speed with a business that had been running for 30+ years, which was in need of a turnaround across the board, and keeping the lights on without being too disruptive, meeting company targets - and learning a new domain - in less ten months - was no easy fete. I needed a system to manage my business, all in one place -- so I single handedly, built a AI-driven BizOps Intelligence Platform - using coding assistants Claude Code and ChatGPT Codex.

What started out initially as a side play project with AI, the first demo was around budget planning and modelling. The name "budget-modeller" was borne - but then as I got immersed and learned more about AI coding, the platform has evolved from budget planning to live SAP dashboards and then into a fully fledged enterprise-grade platform, with AI features, grounded in stable, real-world financial business data.

This platform is now being used daily by myself, my managers and their team members. At a glance, I can check key dashboard signals for operating performance across major business functions. I can track sales performance against budget. I can track the sales account management team's progress. I have eyes on my supply chain performance. I can check expenses over time. I can check my product and engineering team's progress against the product roadmap. I can inspect financial performance. I can inspect my product mix categories. I can inspect my stock for slow-moving materials. I can see how my team are saving money on purchase orders. At any moment in time, I can inspect what material I have available to build. I can look at trends via various dashboards. And with AI, I can ask questions about the data to gain deep insights at the click of a button. I can schedule reports generated by AI agents, on any topic I want. All of the AI is powered by Claude models. I literally have a pulse on my business, with the help of an AI harness I created called "Signal AI".

This platform wasn't a simple vibe-coding application. A lot of thought, architecture and design planning was involved. I leveraged the state-of-the-art AI models to help me build this app. In so doing, I tried to teach myself the latest trends of AI app development, from the ground-up, from first principles. I had a shoestring budget, the platform costs less than R700 per month run.

At the heart of this business is SAP ERP - but it is a legacy old version of SAP. Sure, all the data was already in SAP - but anyone who's experiences SAP from the 2000s can attest it's not the best user experience. I didn't my days to be spent running SAP queries and using Excel pivot tables/charts to get the insights I needed. I wanted an online, modern Insights Platform, that leveraged AI -- so I built it myself, with the help of Claude Code and Open AI's Codex.

In this post, I dive deep by sharing screenshots from the platform itself, some of its core features, capabilities, architecture, AI components and touch on my lessons learnt. It also gives insight into my own skills and experience of AI as a result of building this platform - showing what is within the art of the possible, today, for senior leaders who can leverage AI to build tooling for themselves, whilst having to run their own business -- and you need not hire or outsource the development to a third-party coding agency.