Continuously Conquer the Chaotic Dynamic of Procurement

Daily Procurement Confusion: "When Will My Goods Arrive?"

A Paper client operating in manufacturing knows that getting the required material to the factory floor is complicated, especially when output is customized and project-based. The lack of simple materials — bolts and nuts included — can stop the production process, and the risk of late delivery to the end client can snowball.

When a project comes in, planning identifies the required material, and a Purchase Requisition (PR) is created and forwarded to procurement. A tender runs quickly if the material has no existing supplier. Based on the PR, procurement creates a Purchase Order (PO) for the respective supplier — each supplier needs its own PO, since it carries not just the ordered product but order terms like delivery time and place, incoterm, and payment term. After creation, the PO is printed, signed, and scanned before the hard copy is sent to the supplier, with a digital version sent too, to speed up ordering.

The Complication Hidden From Management

The complexity starts the day after: procurement must follow up on the sent PO to get confirmation that the supplier can fulfill the order entirely and comply with all its terms. If confirmation is unfavorable, the PO must be canceled and a new one created for another supplier, repeating the cycle. Confirmed orders also need follow-up to guarantee on-time delivery — the supplier must be pushed to produce the material. Once goods are ready, procurement must track the Delivery Order (DO) to confirm the goods are picked up, shipped, and handed to third-party logistics. Delay can occur here from unscheduled delivery, bad weather, or customs — and partial delivery is often used to minimize the effect of delay.

After goods arrive, the DO is signed as proof third-party logistics completed the job. Quality control then decides whether the goods qualify, and a GR is created against accepted goods and matched to the PO. Unfortunately the GR often isn't carefully created and matched, due to messiness in the field, leaving procurement and operations unsure whether goods were received — until the supplier sends the invoice, and invoice processing begins by matching it against PO and GR. At this point, procurement and finance must gather hard copies of PO, DO, and GR that may be scattered across partial deliveries.

In manufacturing and other industries with thousands of materials and high ordering frequency, procurement has poor visibility into (1) material that needs to be ordered in the future, (2) whether suppliers have confirmed ordered material, (3) whether goods are in process, in delivery, or received, and (4) whether goods have been billed and paid. That visibility matters — without it, materials can become a production bottleneck, not to mention the risk of double ordering or double payment that directly hits the company's financial health.

Proud of Your ERP, But It Still Needs a Complement

Using the Paper supplier portal, the procure-to-pay process becomes more collaborative by digitizing the interaction between buyer and suppliers. Connected via API, a PO created in ERP is automatically created in Paper. Once approved on the platform, the digital PO is sent to suppliers and confirmed with a click. The PO converts to a DO to inform the buyer that goods are in delivery, and after being GR-ed, it's matched against the GR to show which materials were received. Each order can then be monitored as in process, in delivery, or received, and invoice and payment status are visible on the Paper dashboard to prevent double payment.

Centralized information helps not only the overall department make better decisions, but also monitor project progress and identify bottlenecks. Paper helps procurement and finance reduce operational work via automatic document-matching, and communication with suppliers becomes more transparent since Paper records all document changes and facilitates discussion at the document level.

With the Paper supplier portal and proper change management, a manufacturing company can continuously plan, track, and monitor its procure-to-pay process with a lighter operational burden — a pattern that applies across industries with different business processes.