At Stanley Robotics, every robot that slides under a car to move it around an airport parking lot carries dozens of sophisticated technical components: sensors, electronic boards, industrial PCs, actuators. Finding the right supplier for each one, at the right price and in compliance with applicable standards, is a job in itself. That's exactly the job Stanley Robotics' Robot Engineering team set out to rethink with Procureezy.
"Procureezy helps us reduce the time spent on sourcing, and above all, remove the tediousness of the activity."
Eric Cabrol, Head of Robot Engineering at Stanley Robotics
Stanley Robotics, the art of moving cars without touching them
Stanley Robotics designs robots that look nothing like the humanoids we instinctively picture. These are robotic platforms that slide underneath vehicles, lift them, and move them automatically across airport or logistics sites. It's a feat of engineering that relies on assembling mechanical, electronic, and sensor components that are reliable, certified, and available.
Leading this effort is the Robot Engineering team, headed by Eric Cabrol, Head of Robot Engineering, who oversees around ten engineers. Their mission: make the right component choices in a context where every technical decision has direct consequences on cost, timelines, and regulatory compliance for the robots deployed in the field.
Sourcing under constraint: specs, budget, standards
At Stanley Robotics, finding a component is never just about a single criterion. Several conditions have to be met at once: the product must meet technical requirements, be offered at the best possible price, and comply with applicable standards. This last constraint takes on particular weight with a project underway in Canada, which requires navigating specific North American regulations and anticipating the certification needs of the final product.
Before Procureezy, this research was done by hand: a Google search, a few pages of results skimmed, then a stop as soon as a handful of suitable products turned up, since going further could take years. Results were then logged and compared in Excel files, with manually built filters.
Where existing tools fell short
The arrival of generic LLMs had already brought a first shift: a more synthetic view of the market and quick identification of a few suppliers. But two limitations remained. First, reliability: in the early days of using these models, they had a tendency to hallucinate certain information. Second, and more critically, exhaustiveness: nothing guaranteed that an answer covered the full range of offers available on a given market.
On top of that came another, quieter but equally time-consuming bottleneck: verifying datasheet compliance. Even a seemingly simple component, like an industrial PC embedded on the robots, requires checking a whole set of characteristics: connectivity, memory, temperature range, power supply voltage. Rarely complex work, but consistently slow when done sheet by sheet.
Procureezy in daily use: two distinct use cases
At Stanley Robotics, Procureezy has become part of two key moments in the sourcing process, each addressing a different need.
Lidars have been on the robots since the beginning, and the team knows their characteristics inside out. Here, the goal is to scan the market as exhaustively as possible, with quick access to pricing information — a relatively simple use case where Procureezy delivers a thorough, complete search and answer.
When Stanley Robotics considers enriching its robots' perception with a new type of radar sensor, the need shifts: not exhaustive search, but quickly understanding and structuring an unfamiliar market — who the main players are, whether there are new entrants, how long a supplier has been established. This is exactly what Procureezy's categorization and feature-overview summaries are built to address.
In both cases, our solution played a decisive role, enabling a significantly more exhaustive search of available market offers than manual research, which mechanically stopped after a few pages of results.
Concrete benefits, beyond time savings alone
After using the platform for a few months, several benefits are already clearly identified by the team:
- 1
Reduced risk of missing relevant suppliers left invisible on page 2 or 3 of Google results, one of the biggest concerns flagged by the Robot Engineering team.
- 2
Less time spent on formatting, thanks to results already structured as comparison tables, ready to copy-paste — a gain that grows with component complexity.
- 3
A lighter workload on a task the team considers inherently tedious: the once painstaking hunt for suppliers across dozens of browser tabs.
What's next?
The partnership between Stanley Robotics and Procureezy doesn't stop here. Several avenues for further development have already been identified together:
- Strengthening what already exists, as a priority, before opening up new use cases.
- Going all the way to supplier outreach, once there's enough confidence in product relevance, eventually including checks on availability and lead times.
- Attaching qualified price quotes to identified components, beyond the price estimates currently provided.
- Filtering by product tier (entry-level or premium), to further sharpen result relevance upstream of the search itself.
These are all avenues pointing toward an increasingly automated sourcing process for Stanley Robotics, without ever sacrificing exhaustiveness or reliability.