Purchasing automation: track orders and delivery dates

On Monday you order 40 metres of cable and 12 units. The supplier sends an order confirmation as a PDF. It carries a different delivery date than the one you agreed, and a price two percent higher. Nobody reads it, because thirty more emails arrive that day. On Wednesday your engineer is on site without materials. Purchasing automation is about exactly that: not ordering faster, but automatically checking what comes back from your suppliers. This article covers where the money leaks away, what you can and cannot automate, what it costs and how to start on Monday.

Why purchasing needs more attention than a year ago

If it feels like deliveries go wrong more often than they used to, that is not your imagination. The Nevi purchasing managers index tracks the Dutch manufacturing sector every month. In May 2026 average delivery times lengthened again and the deterioration in supplier performance was the sharpest since May 2022 (source: Nevi, May 2026).

June was no better. For companies buying materials, average delivery times were longer again, and the rise in backlogs was the steepest in four years (source: Nevi PMI, June 2026). For you that means something simple: the chance that an order comes back different from how you placed it is higher than it was a few years ago. And the more often that happens, the more expensive it becomes not to watch those orders.

Placing the order is the easy part

Most business owners think of the order itself when they hear purchasing automation: an email to the supplier, a purchase order out of their system. That part is usually already handled and it costs little time. The trouble starts afterwards. These are the five places where it goes wrong in almost every small business:

• The confirmation differs. You asked for Thursday, the confirmation says Tuesday two weeks out. It sits in a PDF nobody reads line by line.
• No confirmation arrives at all. You assume it will be fine, until you call on the day itself.
• The delivery is only half complete. The packing slip matches what is in the box, but not what you ordered, and the rest follows ‘later’.
• The price does not match the agreement. Two percent here, four percent there. You spot it at the invoice, once you have already approved it.
• Everything lives in one inbox. The colleague who placed the order knows what was agreed. If they are ill or on holiday, nobody does.

None of these five is a disaster on its own. Together they are the reason someone in your company spends half a day a week ‘just checking with the supplier’.

Why your suppliers keep emailing you

There is a tidy solution to all of this: EDI, where systems exchange orders and confirmations directly. But that world is small. Of Dutch companies with 10 or more employees, only 7 percent sold via EDI in 2024. Selling through a website or app stood at 23 percent; in total 27 percent of those companies had electronic sales (source: Statistics Netherlands, Digitalisation and knowledge economy 2025).

What is not sent electronically on one side of the line arrives on the other side as an email, a PDF or a notice in a supplier portal. You cannot force your suppliers to switch, certainly not if you are not their biggest customer. So if anything has to change, it is your side: the confirmation arrives however it arrives, and you make sure something always looks at it.

What you can actually automate on the buying side

Purchasing automation is not an all-or-nothing switch. It is a row of steps, a few of which you take off your people's hands. These lend themselves best to it:

• Reading order confirmations, even when every supplier uses a different layout.
• Putting the confirmation next to your own order: items, quantities, prices and delivery date compared.
• Showing you only the differences. If everything matches, you never have to look.
• Watching whether a confirmation arrives at all. No reply within two days? A reminder goes out to the supplier automatically.
• Keeping a live list of what is still due and when, so your planner knows where things stand.
• Following partial deliveries and back orders until the last box is in.
• Comparing the packing slip against the order on receipt, not against the box.
• Flagging price differences before the invoice is approved, not after.

The most valuable part is not the time you save. It is that your planner knows three days earlier that something will not arrive. Then you move the job, instead of your engineer standing at a locked door while your customer calls to ask where everyone is.

Count orders that go wrong, not hours

Most owners do this sum wrong. They take the minutes spent chasing suppliers, multiply by an hourly rate and conclude it is not so bad. Labour costs per hour worked in the Netherlands averaged 48 euros in 2025 (source: Statistics Netherlands). If someone spends three hours a week chasing, that is roughly 144 euros a week, about 7,000 euros a year. Real money, but not the main prize.

The main prize is what happens when a delivery is late and nobody saw it coming. A worked example (not a measured figure): an installation company with eight engineers moves a job twice a month because materials are missing. Each time that costs half a lost day for two people, a rush order with a surcharge, and a customer who has to be rescheduled. Work out what one of those days costs you. That number, not your hourly rate, decides whether this is worth doing.

What you should not automate

Honest answer: not everything in purchasing belongs in a system. Leave these alone:

• Choosing suppliers and negotiating prices. That is your job. A system has no relationship with your sales rep.
• Approving differences automatically. A price two percent higher can be fine, or the start of a structural increase. You want a human there.
• The first order with a new supplier. You do not yet know what their confirmations look like or what normal behaviour is for them.
• Claims and complaints towards your supplier. That is a conversation, not a message.
• Orders you place once a year. The time saved does not cover the setup.

And if you place fewer than five orders a week with a handful of regular suppliers, a well-kept list is probably enough. We will tell you that too.

What does it cost to have this built?

That depends on how many suppliers you have, how many different layouts come with them and which system it has to end up in. At Socialo it looks like this:

• Monitoring your orders with a few regular suppliers, with a daily list of differences: small project, 300 to 5,000 euros one-off.
• Reading confirmations from dozens of suppliers, comparing them with your orders and writing back into your own system: medium project, 5,000 to 12,000 euros.
• Maintenance afterwards: 100 to 750 euros a month for something small, 750 to 1,500 euros if your company runs on it daily.

Why maintenance? Because suppliers change their forms, renew their portal or suddenly start confirming by email. A check nobody maintains becomes, within a year, a check you no longer trust. And a check you do not trust, you redo yourself, which puts you back where you started.

How to start on Monday

You do not need to turn this into a project. Four questions, one morning:

• Count how many orders you place per week and across how many different suppliers. Under five a week: leave it.
• Pull up your last twenty orders and count how often the confirmation differed from what you ordered. That percentage is your business case.
• Have your team log for one week how much time goes into chasing. Do not estimate, log it.
• Look at where the agreements live right now. In an inbox? In your system? In someone's head?

Then start with your three largest suppliers. They usually cover most of your volume and send the most predictable paperwork. If it works there, expand. If it does not, you have lost very little.