Somewhere in your company, there's a person who genuinely believes the ERP handles procurement. They're usually in IT or finance. They'll point to the purchasing module and say, "It's all in there. PO creation, approval workflows, receiving. What else do you need?"

Ask your procurement team. They'll have a list longer than this entire article.

ERPs are essential systems. They manage transactions, track inventory, handle accounting, run the backbone of manufacturing operations. But procurement, the actual work of finding suppliers, getting quotes, negotiating terms, managing relationships, isn't a transaction. It's communication. It's decision-making. A 2025 survey of 656 manufacturing executives found that 52% of companies still use email and file-sharing services for critical supplier data. Not because they lack systems. Because the systems don't fit the work.

What Does an ERP Actually Do Well?

ERPs handle PO management, approval routing, spend tracking, finance integration. Transactions. They do transactions well. Nobody disputes that.

But notice what all of those have in common: they record decisions that have already been made. The ERP captures the outcome of procurement work. It doesn't help you do the work.

Most people gloss right over that.

Where ERPs Completely Fall Apart for Procurement

The RFQ Process

Try running an RFQ through your ERP. Actually, don't. You'll waste a day and end up doing it in email anyway.

Most ERP purchasing modules have an RFQ function. In theory, you create a record, add line items, select suppliers, send it out. In practice? Teams abandon it almost immediately. The problems aren't fixable with a better UI or a software update. They're structural.

Engineering drawings don't fit. Direct materials RFQs need drawings, specs, revision-controlled technical documents. ERP RFQ modules were designed for part numbers and quantities, not complex document packages. So buyers email the drawings separately and the RFQ record in the ERP becomes a stub that nobody references.

Suppliers never touch your ERP. The system generates an RFQ document, but where does it go? Into an email. The supplier responds with a quote as an email attachment. You're right back where you started, managing everything in Outlook while the ERP sits there with an open record nobody updates.

Then there's the interface. ERP interfaces prioritize data structure over usability. Creating a 300-line RFQ means clicking through multiple screens, filling in dozens of required fields (half of which aren't relevant), fighting a UI that was designed in the early 2000s. Polished since then, sure. Never reimagined. Oracle's Purchasing module still makes you click through what feels like nine different forms to create a single requisition line. SAP's ME41 transaction hasn't fundamentally changed in over a decade.

One large manufacturer described their internal systems team as operating like it was the 1990s. A simple change to their purchasing workflow? Eight to twelve weeks. By the time IT delivered it, the team had already built a workaround in Excel.

Supplier Communication Doesn't Exist

Here's what people outside procurement miss: the job is talking to suppliers. ERPs have zero communication capability. Zero.

Think about everything that happens between "I need to source these parts" and "PO issued." Dozens of emails. Questions about specs. Clarification on drawings. Price negotiations. Follow-ups when suppliers go quiet. Lead time updates. That's the job. That's 90% of what a buyer does all day.

None of it lives in the ERP. None of it can live there. ERPs were built for structured transactions, not for chasing a machine shop in Shenzhen who hasn't responded in four days.

So your team does all that work in email, then manually enters the result into the ERP. The system captures maybe 5% of the procurement workflow. The other 95%? Invisible.

Data Quality Falls Apart Fast

ERPs are only as good as the data people enter. When the system is painful to use, people put in the bare minimum.

An aerospace company we talked to implemented a supply chain analytics tool on top of SAP. They turned it off. The SAP data was, in their words, "too corrupt and poisoned" to be useful. Years of manual entry, inconsistent categorization, placeholder values.

This is the norm. APQC research finds that over 60% of invoice errors come from manual data entry, and ERP data entry is no different. When your ERP requires 15 mandatory fields to create a purchase requisition and half aren't relevant to the actual purchase, people fill in garbage to get through the screen. Give it a few years and your "system of record" becomes a system of approximations. We've talked to teams running NetSuite where the commodity code field is "MISC" on 40% of their POs. That's not a system of record. That's a graveyard.

The Implementation Trap

ERP implementations are notorious for cost overruns and timeline blowouts. Procurement gets treated as an afterthought in the rollout.

Large deployments take one to five years. They cost tens of millions, sometimes hundreds of millions. The procurement module gets configured as part of this larger rollout, typically by consultants who understand ERP architecture but have never sourced a part in their life.

The result is a system that technically supports purchasing but doesn't match real workflows. Buyers find it rigid, slow, totally disconnected from where they actually work: email. So they build parallel processes in spreadsheets and Outlook. Every company. Same story.

Even major upgrades backfire. One CPG company migrated to a next-gen platform and found procurement became more manual, not less. More clicks, more fields, more workarounds than the old system. Nobody in procurement was celebrating that go-live.

How Procurement Teams Actually Work

So what really happens at most manufacturers?

Email. That's where the work happens. Supplier communication, quote requests, follow-ups, negotiations, order confirmations, all of it flows through the inbox. This isn't a workaround. It's the default.

Then Excel. Quote comparisons, supplier scorecards, RFQ trackers. All spreadsheets. Your ERP vendor won't like hearing this, but Excel is the real analytical tool for most procurement teams. We've seen buyers with 37-tab workbooks tracking 400+ open POs. It's insane, but it works better than the alternative.

The ERP? That's where transactions get recorded at the end. POs created, approvals routed, receiving logged. Important, sure. But it's the tail end.

It persists because it actually works better than forcing everything through the ERP. Procurement teams have voted with their behavior. They chose email and spreadsheets over the purchasing module. That tells you something.

Why "Just Use the ERP" Is Terrible Advice

When procurement teams push for better tools, they hear this from IT or finance: "We already paid for this ERP. Just use the purchasing module."

This misses the point entirely. The purchasing module handles PO creation and approval. That's one step in a 20-step workflow. Telling procurement to "just use the ERP" is like telling a sales team to "just use the CRM" when the CRM can only record closed deals. No pipeline, no outreach, no follow-ups.

You wouldn't tell sales to run their entire process in an accounting system just because it can record revenue. But that's exactly what "just use the ERP" amounts to. And honestly, I think people in IT know this. They just don't want to justify another software purchase.

What Should You Use Instead?

Nobody's saying rip out your ERP. It serves a real function as the system of record and the integration point between purchasing, inventory, finance, and production planning. Keep it for what it does well.

But you need something on top that handles everything before the PO gets created.

Start with communication. You need a system that organizes supplier conversations automatically, without buyers manually logging every interaction. It has to work inside email. If it asks people to switch to a portal or a new app, they won't use it. When a supplier responds to an RFQ, the system should capture that response, extract the data, link it to the right sourcing event. When a PO confirmation arrives via email, the order status should update without someone typing it into SAP.

Quote processing is the other big one. Right now, normalizing quotes from different suppliers takes days. A buyer gets five PDFs in five different formats, opens each one, scrolls to find the unit price, copies it into column F, applies the tariff adjustment, calculates landed cost. Ardent Partners' AP Metrics That Matter report found that manual document processing averages 17.4 days versus 3.1 days automated. With AI extraction, that same work takes minutes.

Follow-ups are the first thing that slips when workload spikes. Automated sequences that check in with suppliers who haven't responded to RFQs, chase PO confirmations, request ship date updates. This is the "place and chase" work that eats 20+ hours per buyer per week. Nobody should be copy-pasting "Just checking in on this" into Outlook forty times a day.

You also need visibility without the Friday afternoon spreadsheet ritual. A dashboard showing the status of every active RFQ, every pending PO, every at-risk delivery, built from communication that's already happening. Not from someone spending three hours copying statuses from their inbox into a tracker on Friday at 4pm.

All of this should feed your ERP. When a sourcing decision is made and a PO needs creating, the tool pushes the data into your ERP so the transaction gets recorded properly. The ERP stays the system of record. Your procurement tool handles everything that comes before.

How to Evaluate Procurement Software

If you're looking at tools to complement your ERP, skip the feature matrices. Ask these questions instead.

Does it work with email? Supplier portals are a waste of money for 90% of manufacturers. I'll die on this hill. If your tool requires suppliers to log into a portal, it'll fail for the same reasons every supplier portal has failed since 2005. Your suppliers are machine shops and contract manufacturers. They live in email. Meet them there.

Can it handle messy data? PDFs, spreadsheets, email text, scanned documents. If it requires clean, structured inputs, it's adding manual work, not reducing it.

How does ERP integration actually work? Not "we integrate with SAP" on a marketing page. How? API? Flat file? Does PO data flow in without re-entry, or does someone still have to copy-paste?

What's the implementation timeline? If it takes six months and a dedicated integration team, you've already got your answer. Procurement teams need tools they can adopt in days or weeks.

Is the pricing sane? Coupa and Jaggaer run hundreds of thousands per year. If you're a team of five buyers, that math doesn't work.

Keep Your ERP. Add What's Missing.

Most procurement leaders already know this, even if they can't get IT to agree. McKinsey estimates AI can deliver efficiency gains of 20 to 30 percent or more in procurement operations, but only if the tools sit where the work actually happens. Not buried inside an ERP module that your buyers have already stopped using. The ERP handles the transactional end. Everything else, the sourcing, communication, negotiation, decision-making that takes up most of your team's time, needs its own tool.

Stop pretending your ERP can do something it was never designed to do.

Lumari lives in your buyers' inboxes, not in another tab they'll forget about. It handles supplier communication, quote extraction, follow-ups, and RFQ management, then pushes the results into your ERP. You can deploy it in days. Take a look.

Sources

1. BusinessWire, "Half of Companies Still Use Email or In-Person Meetings to Share Critical Supplier Data" - https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250909900208/en/Half-of-Companies-Still-Use-Email-or-In-Person-Meetings-to-Share-Critical-Supplier-Data

2. McKinsey & Company, "Redefining procurement performance in the era of agentic AI" - https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/operations/our-insights/redefining-procurement-performance-in-the-era-of-agentic-ai

3. APQC via Supply & Demand Chain Executive, "Top Performers in Procurement Achieve Cycle Time Efficiency" - https://www.sdcexec.com/sourcing-procurement/article/11647230/apqc-top-performers-in-procurement-achieve-cycle-time-efficiency