You send a purchase order. Silence. You follow up three days later. More silence. You follow up again. Finally, someone on the supplier side shoots back a half-answer. You key it into your ERP by hand. Then you do the whole thing over for the next PO.
And the next one. And the next one.
This is "place and chase." If you work in procurement at a manufacturer, it's probably eating 20+ hours of your week. McKinsey estimates AI can deliver efficiency gains of 20 to 30 percent or more in procurement operations, and most of that comes from killing exactly this kind of repetitive busywork. You already know it's a problem. You just haven't found a fix that doesn't require a six-figure platform and a year of implementation.
The frustrating part? It's not hard work. It's boring, repetitive work that burns the hours your team could spend on actual procurement. You didn't get into this career to be a glorified expediter. But here you are, copying dates from emails into spreadsheets, wondering if that shipment from your PCB supplier is actually going to land on time.
Why Does Every Procurement Team Deal with Place and Chase?
Every procurement team we've talked to describes some version of the same loop. The details change. The shape doesn't.
One robotics manufacturer told us they had 671 open purchase orders at any given time, managed by three people. Between 10% and 20% of those POs were late, and suppliers almost never flagged delays on their own. The team only found out about problems when they went looking. So they had to go looking constantly.
An oilfield services company manages roughly 255,000 PO line items per year. Their team described PO expediting as "a constant everyday thing." Not a weekly check-in. Every single day, someone's chasing down a status update.
A food equipment manufacturer told us a single purchase order can generate 25 to 50 email touchpoints over its lifecycle. Acknowledgments, date confirmations, ship notices, partial shipments, change orders. For one PO.
Multiply that across hundreds of open orders and you start to understand why procurement teams feel permanently underwater.
What Does a Typical PO Follow-Up Cycle Actually Look Like?
Map out the lifecycle of a single purchase order and it goes something like this:
You email the PO. Three days of silence. You follow up asking for acknowledgment. Around day five the supplier responds, acknowledges the PO, but won't commit to a delivery date. So you follow up again asking for a confirmed ship date.
Day 12, they finally give you a date. It's two weeks later than requested. Now you're escalating internally, negotiating, getting a revised date. Day 14, you manually key the updated date into the ERP. Day 20 to 30, you follow up again to make sure it's still on track. And if it's late? The whole cycle ramps up. More emails, more calls, more manual updates.
Now picture doing this for 200 or 1,000 open POs at once. That's Tuesday.
The Real Cost of Place and Chase
The obvious cost is labor. If a buyer spends 20 hours a week chasing suppliers, that's half their workweek gone. Five buyers? That's 100 hours a week, roughly 2.5 full-time salaries poured into sending "hey, where's my stuff?" emails.
But the bigger costs don't show up on a timesheet.
Production delays are the scary one. In aerospace, grounding penalties can run $10,000 to $100,000+ per day when a critical part doesn't arrive. Even outside aerospace, one late component can shut down a production line. When your team's spread across hundreds of POs, the critical ones don't always get attention until it's too late.
The firefighting problem is worse. One procurement leader put it this way: "The only way to be proactive is having some live level of automation." Without it, you're always reacting. You find out about a delay after it's already wrecking your production schedule.
Good procurement professionals don't want to spend their careers copying email updates into SAP. They want to negotiate better deals and build supplier relationships that actually save money. When the job becomes 80% data entry and follow-up? They leave. You lose your best people to companies where procurement actually means procurement.
And strategic work just never happens. Nobody has time to analyze spend data or negotiate volume discounts. The stuff that actually moves the needle gets pushed to "when we have time." Which is never.
Why Won't Suppliers Just Fix This?
Procurement tech vendors love to pretend this isn't true, but suppliers aren't going to change their behavior for you.
Most suppliers, especially the small and mid-size shops that manufacturers actually depend on, communicate over email. A 2025 survey of 656 manufacturing executives found that 52% of companies still use email and file-sharing services for critical supplier data. Only 43% even have a digital collaboration platform. They're not logging into your portal. They're not adopting your EDI standard. They're definitely not downloading an app. Most of them are running QuickBooks and a shared inbox. They've got their own systems, their own customers, their own fires to put out.
This is why so many procurement tools flop in practice. They demand supplier adoption, and suppliers just... don't. The tool becomes shelfware, sitting next to the email inbox where the real work still happens.
Any real solution to place and chase has to work within email. Not alongside it, not as a replacement. Within it.
How Does AI Change PO Follow-Ups?
AI follow-up doesn't look like traditional procurement software. There's no portal. No supplier login. It sits inside the channel that already works: email.
It follows up on a schedule so your buyers don't have to. Instead of someone manually remembering to check on PO-4523, the AI sends a follow-up to the supplier at the right interval. The message reads like a human wrote it. Conversational, not a system notification that gets auto-archived.
When a supplier replies with "Shipping next Tuesday, tracking number 1Z999AA10," the AI reads that, pulls out the ship date and tracking info, and structures it for your records. No copy-pasting.
Supplier confirmed a date later than what the PO requested? Gone quiet for too long? Flagged. Your buyers only step in when something genuinely needs their judgment.
When your production planner asks "where's the aluminum extrusion for job 7842?" you can answer in seconds because every PO's status lives in one place. No digging through Outlook threads.
Over time, it learns how your supply base actually works. Which suppliers respond fast. Which ones need three nudges before they'll give you a ship date. Give it a few months and it knows your suppliers better than your newest buyer does.
A Buyer's Day with AI Follow-Ups
Say you're a buyer managing 300 open POs. You come in, check your dashboard instead of wading through your inbox.
280 POs are on track. Confirmed dates, no issues. The AI's been sending follow-ups and pulling status updates out of supplier replies all week.
Twelve POs have flagged exceptions. A couple suppliers confirmed late dates, two have gone radio silent despite multiple follow-ups, one sent a partial shipment that doesn't match the PO quantity.
You spend your morning on those 12. Real problems that need human judgment. You call the silent supplier, push back on the one who slipped the date, work with receiving on the partial shipment.
By noon, you've handled more actual issues than you used to handle in a week. Because you're not wasting time on the 280 POs that are fine.
That afternoon? You review quotes for a new project. You dig into spend data and spot a chance to consolidate two suppliers. You actually have time to talk to your VP about supply risk for Q3.
That's what the job should be. Not inbox archaeology.
Can You Get Started Without a Huge Implementation?
You don't need to rip out your ERP or run a data migration. Your suppliers don't need to learn anything new.
Connect your email, import your open POs, let the AI start working. Most teams see results in the first week because the AI is doing the same workflow you already do, just faster and without dropping the ball.
Start with a specific, measurable problem. PO follow-ups are the obvious starting point because the ROI is immediate and you'll know within days if it's working.
The Numbers After Switching
Based on what teams tell us, time spent on follow-ups drops 60% to 80%. Instead of 20 hours per week per buyer, it's 4 to 8, focused entirely on exceptions instead of routine chasing. Teams also catch potential delays 5 to 10 days earlier because they're not waiting for someone to notice a missed response buried in an inbox.
The data accuracy piece is underrated. When info gets extracted directly from supplier emails instead of being manually re-typed, you stop losing data in translation. (An APQC benchmarking study found that over 60% of invoice errors come from manual data entry, and the same problem hits PO tracking when buyers are re-typing dates and quantities from emails.) No transposition errors. No forgotten updates.
The Hackett Group found that world-class procurement organizations operate with 29% fewer staff and 21% lower labor costs. But the metric leadership cares about most: your team can handle more POs without adding headcount. That three-person team managing 671 POs? With AI handling follow-ups, they could manage twice that and actually have time to do the work procurement is supposed to be about.
Place and Chase Is a Trap
It keeps your best people stuck doing admin, burns them out, and guarantees procurement never gets a seat at the table. Hiring more buyers to chase faster doesn't fix anything. You have to kill the chasing itself.
Lumari follows up with suppliers over email, pulls status updates automatically, and gives your team a single place to see every open PO. No portal, no supplier onboarding. If your team's still spending half their week as glorified email forwarding machines, that can stop today.
Sources
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
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
The Hackett Group, "World-Class Procurement Organizations See 21 Percent Lower Labor Costs" - https://www.thehackettgroup.com/hackett-world-class-procurement-organizations-see-21-percent-lower-labor-costs-while-digital-transformation-continues-to-raise-the-bar-on-procurement-performance/
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