How a construction company's procurement gets the full weekly report every Monday

Who is the company and why does it need a weekly report?

Think of a construction company with several active sites and a procurement lead who buys materials, rents equipment and contracts services. Every week it has several active requests for quotation on Markonex, some with lists of dozens of lines.

On Monday the director wants to know where procurement stands: which offers came in, which is best on each line, which agreements need confirming and which invoices arrived.

How was the report made before the agent?

The procurement lead opened every request, copied the offers into a spreadsheet, checked agreements and contracts and sent an email. Monday morning went into collecting data, not buying.

• The line-by-line comparison was redone by hand for every request with a product list.
• Agreements waiting for the company's confirmation were noticed late.
• Invoices received on agreements were checked separately.

What do you need to start an agent like this?

Markonex Agents are Claude agents, from Anthropic, that a company creates in the Markonex Agents web app. The agent works for the company, not for a single employee, and uses the company's own Anthropic API key: model usage is paid directly to Anthropic, from the company's prepaid credits, not to Markonex. The cost shown in the app is an estimate.

• The company is verified by the platform (the "Verified by the platform" badge).
• The administrator turns on Agents and MCP under My company → AI assistants → Agents and ticks the information notice.
• In Markonex Agents, under "API keys", the company adds its Anthropic key; only the last 4 characters remain visible.
• The "New agent" wizard has these steps: API key, Model, Instructions, Permissions, Schedules, Limits (monthly budget, per-run budget, maximum runs per day) and Summary.
• Permissions in plain language: read-only access to requests for quotation, offers, agreements, contracts and invoices. The agent gets no write permission at all.

How do you try it safely, before using real data?

Every company has a separate test environment: a "(TEST)" company and up to two test partner companies, with their own data, no emails, no push notifications and no ANAF or e-Factura. There you can create a few sample requests and offers between the test company and the test partners to see what the report looks like before running it on real data.

In the test environment the agent confirms its own actions, so you can see the whole flow quickly. In the real account the same actions wait for a person to approve them. The test environment can be reset or deleted at any time.

Step 1: describe the report you want

The agent writes the report in the form you describe. You can ask for sections, an order and a level of detail.

1. Agent instructions

   Every Monday, write last week's procurement report: 1) active requests for quotation and how many offers each received; 2) for requests with product lists, the best offer on each line and the lines with no offer; 3) agreements waiting for our confirmation; 4) contracts in progress; 5) invoices received on agreements. At the end, three things that need a decision this week.

Step 2: schedule the Monday morning run

The schedule can be Monday at 7:30, Romanian time. For a weekly report one run per week is enough, and you set the budget under "Limits".

Step 3: the agent reads the data and writes the report

The agent reads the requests, the line-by-line comparison of offers, agreements, contracts and invoices received, then writes the report in the agent's "Runs" tab in Markonex Agents.

1. The agent

   Last week: 5 active requests for quotation, 17 offers received. The request for site 2 materials (38 lines): the best offer differs by line between two suppliers, and 4 lines have no offer yet. 2 agreements are waiting for our confirmation. 1 contract is waiting for the supplier to accept it. 3 invoices received on agreements. To decide: awarding the lines on the site 2 request, confirming the 2 agreements, the request expiring on Wednesday without enough offers.

Step 4: the team decides and works in the platform

The report shows what needs doing; people make the decisions. The procurement lead awards the lines, confirms the agreements and negotiates directly in the platform, as before.

What changes for procurement and for the director?

The week starts with decisions instead of data collection. The director sees the same picture as the procurement lead, and lines with no offer or unconfirmed agreements are flagged on day one. As an illustrative estimate, a report that took a morning of work can be read in ten minutes; the real time depends on the number of requests and on how complex the lists are.

What limits and safeguards does the agent have?

The agent has a single tool: the Markonex MCP server. It does not browse the web, open files or run code. It has no memory between runs: each run starts from the data in the platform and the instructions the company wrote. Because it only has read permissions, the agent in this scenario cannot create, send or change anything. Invoices are read-only through MCP anyway.

• It works only with the permissions ticked when it was created, within the rights of the user whose identity it uses.
• Schedules run at most once an hour, on Romanian time; a run may start a few minutes late.
• Prepared commercial actions wait for approval by a user with the agents-management permission, who is notified in the app, by push or by email; the approval is valid for 24 hours and only while the run is still active.
• An approved action runs in the name of the person who approved it, and the activity log shows "Name (via Anthropic agent #id)".
• The agent cannot issue or cancel invoices, sends nothing to e-Factura, makes no payments and cannot administer the company or its users.
• If the administrator turns Agents off for the company, all agent access is revoked at once.