A food manufacturer with roughly $25 million in annual purchases ran on urgent POs. Their buyer processed 40 purchase orders a day, and at least six of them were emergency orders placed because someone forgot a component. The purchasing manager and the production supervisor had a loud shouting match in the hallway over a missing spice blend. The production supervisor won — mostly by being louder.
The 2 AM question: are you buying on demand or buying on panic?
Here’s what’s predictable: if more than 10% of your POs qualify as “urgent,” your planning process is the problem, not your buyers. ERP Consulting for this company started by tagging every purchase order with a reason code — rushed, planned, or forecast-driven. The data took four weeks to mean anything because people had to trust that the tag wouldn’t get them in trouble.
Why do companies hit 60% emergency orders? Because nobody reconciles what’s in stock with what’s in the pipeline. Buyers act on what they remember from yesterday’s rush, not on a single source of truth.
- Tag every PO with a code: planned, forecast, or emergency — no exceptions
- Run a weekly “stock-to-commit” report: what’s on hand, what’s on order, what’s promised
- Set a two-week minimum on all non-perishable reorder points so there’s always a buffer that absorbs one miss
Give buyers time to actually buy
The manufacturer realized its top buyer was spending 40% of the day answering chat messages and matching invoices. ERP Consulting redirected those tasks to a simpler rule: invoices go to the system, the system flags mismatches, and buyers only look at exceptions. That freed up seven hours of buyer time per week.
By month four, emergency POs fell from 15% of orders to 4%. The shouting match stopped, not because people got nicer, but because the production supervisor found inventory appearing on a routine schedule instead of a crisis.
If you’re not tagging your emergency orders, start tomorrow. You can’t improve what you can’t count.