Activa ProveedoresIn our previous article we showed that a procurement process has nine steps and that most companies digitized only one: issuing the order.
The most common reaction was: "ok, but it works; we've always done it this way".
It's true. It works. The right question isn't whether it works, but how much it costs you to have it work this way. Because the status quo isn't free: it has a price, you pay it every month, and it doesn't show up in any report.
Where you stand today (even if nobody measures it)
If your operation looks like that of most industrial companies in the region, Procurement's day-to-day goes more or less like this: buyers spend a good part of their week chasing statuses by phone, email and WhatsApp; deviations are discovered when the delivery didn't arrive, not when the supplier had the problem; emergencies are solved with emergency purchases several times more expensive, sometimes for items that were already in transit; and nobody can say on the spot how many overdue lines there are today or which ones put the operation at risk.
That's the current state. It's not a catastrophe: it's worse, it's invisible. It became normal.
The price of the blind spot
Let's put conservative numbers on it. In an operation with 300 weekly deliveries and 50 active suppliers:
Time: if each manual follow-up takes 10-15 minutes and there are dozens per week, a team of buyers may be spending between 40% and 60% of its capacity chasing statuses. Not negotiating, not planning: asking "where is my order?".
Late reaction: every day of delay that is discovered late is lost room to react. The difference between rescheduling a delivery and stopping a production line is usually exactly that margin.
Capital: emergency purchases and defensive overstock—buying extra "just in case", because there is no visibility—tie up working capital the operation doesn't need to tie up.
Supplier relationships: the supplier who gets five calls to confirm the same thing keeps moving you down their priority list. And you pay for that in the next emergency.
None of these costs appears as a line in the P&L. All of them exist.
What the other shore looks like
Procurement teams that closed these blind spots operate differently: the supplier updates the status of each order on a platform and nobody calls to ask; overdue and soon-to-be-overdue lines are on a single dashboard, prioritized by criticality; deviations trigger automatic alerts the day they happen, not the day they hurt; and the buyer manages by exception, stepping in only where a decision is needed.
Typical results we measured in recent implementations: +30% on-time delivery (OTD) in the first 3 months and -50% manual follow-up work.
The gap isn't closed with more people or another ERP
The distance between one scenario and the other isn't closed by hiring another buyer (more people chasing statuses) or by migrating ERPs (ERPs record past transactions; they don't manage flows in progress).
It's closed by extending digitization to the steps that today live in email and WhatsApp: supplier confirmation, production progress, dispatch, transit. With the supplier as an active user of the process and with alerts that work on their own.
That is exactly what Activa Proveedores does, without changing your ERP and without stopping the operation.
How much does not knowing where your orders are cost you today? If you want to size it on your own operation, book a 15-30 minute meeting: https://meet.brevo.com/ramonsaravia