I am pharmacist, in France and I order directly from more than a hundred suppliers. Most orders are a web form, an email or a phone call .
I built a buying agent for my pharmacy and the problem came fast: there is nobody to talk to on the other side. A supplier has a sales rep with a mailbox, sometimes an ERP.
The idea is PharmA2A. It's based on the A2A protocol. PharmA2A says what they say. Five messages, each one a JSON Schema: supplier sheet, order , acknowledgement line by line, state of the shelf, follow-up.
Some rules are strict. The order never has a pharmacy's price in it. Nothing is invented. And a message that says nothing is not a confirmation. One of the first answers we got from a sales rep was "looks good to me :)". Is that a confirmation? We had to decide.
In the repo: the spec (CC0), a sample supplier agent in about a hundred lines of Python, an email bridge for suppliers who only have a mailbox, and a demo pharmacy.
It has carried real orders since October, in my own pharmacy. No supplier runs its own agent yet.
I would like your opinion: is an A2A profile extension the right shape for this? And what would a supplier's IT team need to plug an ERP into it?
Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50471847
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