Procurement Knowledge MCP

Local data pipeline and MCP server for querying a procurement and inventory document corpus (invoices, purchase orders, shipping orders, inventory reports, contracts).

Status: Pipeline and MCP server complete. Run make ingest once, then connect an MCP client to query preprocessed artifacts.

Design decisions and trade-offs: CAPABILITY_TRACKER.md.

Requirements

• Python 3.11+

• uv package manager

• Tesseract OCR (brew install tesseract on macOS)

• Cursor or another MCP-compatible client

Related MCP server: TradeMCP

Setup

Extract corpus data

From the project root, unzip the bundled archive. It creates data/ in place (no copying or rearranging files):

unzip test-data.zip

Expected layout: data/invoices/, data/purchase_orders/, data/shipping_orders/, data/inventory_reports/, data/contracts/ (~45 documents).

Install uv

curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh

Virtual environment on external drives

If the project lives on an external volume, uv may fail to create .venv on that drive due to macOS ._* (AppleDouble) files.

cp .env.example .env

Edit .env:

UV_PROJECT_ENVIRONMENT=/Users/you/.venvs/procurement-knowledge-mcp
mkdir -p ~/.venvs

Use make or source .env before bare uv run commands.

Install dependencies

make sync
# or: uv sync --all-groups

Development workflow

make          # same as make check
make check    # ruff + mypy + full pytest with coverage (CI / pre-commit gate)
make test-fast # unit tests only, no coverage (skips corpus ingest)
make test     # full pytest with terminal coverage
make test-integration # slow corpus / ingest tests only
make test-cov # pytest + htmlcov/
make cursor-setup # sync deps + verify MCP launcher
make smoke    # MCP tool smoke test (requires make ingest)
make ingest   # test-fast, then full ingest
make mcp      # test-fast, then MCP server (stdio)

Coverage artifacts (.coverage, htmlcov/) are gitignored.

Architecture

flowchart LR
    subgraph ingest [ingest.py]
        D[discover] --> E[extract] --> M[model]
        M --> C[compare] --> CH[chunk] --> I[index]
    end

    subgraph artifacts [processed/ and index/]
        DJ[documents.jsonl]
        OI[order_index.json]
        CAT[catalog.json]
        OC[order_comparisons.json]
        CJ[chunks.jsonl]
        DB[knowledge.db]
    end

    subgraph mcp [mcp_server.py]
        T1[search_documents]
        T2[list_documents]
        T3[get_document]
        T4[find_document_gaps]
        T5[compare_order_documents]
        T6[get_knowledge_base_summary]
    end

    data[(data/)] --> D
    M --> DJ
    M --> OI
    C --> CAT
    C --> OC
    CH --> CJ
    I --> DB
    DJ --> mcp
    CAT --> mcp
    OC --> mcp
    DB --> T1

Pipeline

discover -> extract -> model -> compare -> chunk -> index

Typical ingest result: 45 documents, 19 orders, 130 chunks.

Data modeling

• Content-primary fields: order_id, totals, line items, inventory period parsed from document body (or OCR), with field_provenance on each field.

• Path-based identity only: doc_id, source_path, doc_type (from folder). Filename patterns are fallbacks, never silent authority for linking.

• Order index: maps content-derived order_id to doc_id lists. Scanned JPG invoices without OCR order_id are excluded and listed in catalog.json.

• Comparisons: precomputed per-order presence, total matching (?0.01), and line-item checks in order_comparisons.json.

Retrieval strategy

Chunking: one chunk per page (invoice, PO, shipping, contract); one chunk per inventory report; contract boilerplate stripped.

Identity and duplicate handling

Run the ingest pipeline

make ingest

Custom paths:

uv run python ingest.py --data ./data --processed ./processed --index ./index

Run the MCP server

Smoke test all six tools against ingested artifacts (no client required):

make ingest   # once, if processed/ and index/ are missing
make smoke    # or: uv run python scripts/smoke_test_mcp.py

Start the stdio server for Cursor or another MCP client (make mcp runs test-fast first, then blocks):

make mcp

Press Ctrl+C to stop the server.

Required artifacts

make ingest must complete successfully before MCP tools work:

• processed/documents.jsonl

• processed/order_index.json

• processed/catalog.json

• processed/order_comparisons.json

• index/knowledge.db

MCP tools

Every tool returns a top-level sources[] array (citations). Use these for grounded answers.

Citation schema

Each entry in sources[] includes:

doc_id, source_path, doc_type, page, chunk_id, field, value, snippet, field_provenance, extraction_method, confidence, citation_label

Built by procurement/citations.py (build_citation, build_citation_from_chunk).

Connect Cursor

Project MCP config is committed at .cursor/mcp.json. It runs scripts/run_mcp.sh, which uses uv and loads .env (for UV_PROJECT_ENVIRONMENT on external drives).

make cursor-setup   # uv sync + chmod launcher
make ingest         # required once before MCP queries work

In Cursor: Developer: Reload Window, then Settings ? MCP and confirm procurement-knowledge is connected. In Agent mode, ask the agent to use procurement-knowledge tools.

To override paths locally, copy the server block to ~/.cursor/mcp.json or edit the project file.

Validate basic questions (Cursor Agent)

Use tests/prompts/test_questions.txt for a manual end-to-end check after ingest and MCP connect:

1. Run make ingest and confirm procurement-knowledge is connected (see above).

2. Open Agent chat and attach or paste the prompt file (@tests/prompts/test_questions.txt).

3. Ask the agent to follow the file instructions: one question at a time, grounded answers with procurement-knowledge tools, and show the answer before the next question.

The prompt covers assignment-style questions (missing POs, order 10687, shipment vs invoice, contract terms, mismatches, inventory periods). Answers should cite sources[] from tool results.

Automated coverage of the same paths lives in tests/test_mcp_tools.py; make smoke exercises tools without a client.

Example queries (assignment-style)

After make ingest, automated tests in tests/test_mcp_tools.py exercise these paths. Expected results on the bundled corpus:

Sample compare_order_documents("10687") summary:

Order 10687: invoice and shipping totals match; purchase order missing.

Project layout

procurement-knowledge-mcp/
  test-data.zip         # Corpus archive; unzip at repo root ? data/
  data/                 # Source documents (read-only; from test-data.zip)
  processed/            # Generated JSON/JSONL (gitignored)
  index/                # SQLite FTS index (gitignored)
  procurement/          # Pipeline library
  ingest.py             # Ingest CLI
  mcp_server.py         # MCP server (stdio)
  tests/                # pytest suite
    prompts/
      test_questions.txt  # Cursor Agent manual validation prompt
  pyproject.toml
  Makefile

Testing

make test-fast        # quick unit loop during development
make test             # full suite with coverage
make test-integration # corpus / full-ingest tests only
make check            # lint + typecheck + full suite with coverage

Current suite: 130 passed, 100% coverage on measured source (make check).

Integration tests (marked @pytest.mark.integration) run discover ? ingest on data/ and validate known orders (10687, 10248) and gap lists. make test-fast skips them for a faster feedback loop.

For interactive validation in Cursor, use tests/prompts/test_questions.txt (see Validate basic questions under Connect Cursor).

Verbose:

set -a && source .env && set +a && uv run pytest -v

Troubleshooting

Known limitations

• No vector embeddings (FTS keyword search only).

• Scanned JPG invoices without OCR order_id are excluded from the order index.

• Line-item matching is best-effort regex parsing, not layout-aware extraction.

• Contract text is page-chunked plain text (no clause segmentation).

AI-assisted development

This project was developed with AI assistance (Cursor). Design decisions follow a content-primary modeling policy with explicit trade-offs for a 3?5 hour take-home scope. Validation: make check (lint, types, 100% coverage), make smoke, pytest in tests/test_mcp_tools.py, and manual Agent runs via tests/prompts/test_questions.txt.