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Norco: AI-First Manufacturing
as RV Demand Surges

Challenge

Scale the RV cycle without the hire/fire swing.

Norco’s leadership wanted AI to improve life for employees and customers alike while flexing capacity up or down with demand—without defaulting to a costly hire-and-layoff pattern every time the market turned.

In a cyclical industry, automation that scales with order books can absorb volatility and protect both cash flow and community relationships. Norco also wanted operational telemetry: clearer insight into factory-floor and back-office processes so management could steer earlier.

“What attracted us to Kognitos is a clear jump in the evolution of this technology. I think Kognitos has a head start – and how they proceed from here is a question of how they take advantage of it. If you’ve heard Jensen Huang, he talks about how code should be English going forward and Kognitos is doing this. I think they’ll do well, they’ve really got a good product here.”
Portrait of Chris Richner
Chris Richner CIO, Norco Industries
Norco needed a platform that could:
  • Smooth demand shocks instead of amplifying them through staffing swings
  • Balance operations and cash flow over multi-year horizons
  • Stay approachable for business teams without massive IT projects or retraining programs
Infographic: four processes within Norco’s Accounts Receivables flow through Automation to streamlined time-consuming processes, employees focusing on strategic tasks, and improved workflow efficiency.
Solution

English as Code. Finance today, enterprise tomorrow.

Multi-process automation

Norco mapped a three-year transformation roadmap with Kognitos beginning in Finance, then expanding toward HR, Sales, and Production engineering. Accounts receivable was the first beachhead: four high-variance processes where pure rules engines and legacy RPA could not keep pace with customer-specific exceptions.

Inbound pack slips now land in a monitored inbox where Kognitos splits multi-page PDFs into individual Epicor invoices using customer-specific business logic—tax jurisdictions, freight rules, and more. Each run validates against stored master data; when something is missing or mismatched, AR subject matter experts collaborate with the platform in plain English, teach the resolution once, and lock in deterministic behavior for the next occurrence.

Expanding AI across the enterprise

Beyond AR, Norco is applying the same governed approach to recruiting operations (transcribing voice screens, auto-scheduling interviews), entering sales orders into ERP, and generating customer-ready safety audit reports—each workflow described, owned, and refined by the teams closest to the work.

Read the full case study Download the PDF for roadmap detail, SME workflows, and leadership commentary.
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Frequently asked questions about the Norco Industries story

Norco's CIO Chris Richner described Kognitos as 'a clear jump in the evolution of this technology' and emphasized that English-as-code lets business users describe rules directly. Traditional RPA required developers for every change; Kognitos lets Norco's finance and operations teams own the automation themselves.
Norco employees save 10–15 hours per week today and expect savings to grow significantly as they expand automation across additional processes. The company explicitly chose Kognitos as a strategic investment to scale operations as the RV market heated up — without proportionally scaling headcount.
Norco started with repetitive document-heavy tasks across finance and operations, then expanded. Common AI-first targets in RV and discrete manufacturing include invoice processing, supplier onboarding, BOL verification, ERP data entry, and 3-way match — all areas where document variability defeats legacy RPA.
Kognitos automations are described in plain English and tested before production, so the path from a documented SOP to a running automation is typically days, not the months a UiPath deployment requires. Norco was able to iterate on new processes the same week the previous one shipped.

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