POs checked against the catalogue, certificates against the spec

The question this file answersHow many people do we have reading POs and certificates whose answer already sits in the catalogue and the spec?

Fits: mid-size manufacturers handling 50–500+ POs a day where certificates arrive with the goods; in the composite, a ~200-PO-a-day flow from email and EDI

Not for: plants whose large suppliers already send everything by EDI and whose certificates come structured through a supplier portal — the retyping is not your cost

Typical day

What the desk looks like today

Typical, from the manufacturing playbook. Purchase orders come in at 50–500 a day for a mid-size plant — about 200 in the composite — by email, EDI and sometimes fax. A clerk reads each, checks the supplier catalogue and the budget, types it into the ERP and chases the changes. Certificates come with the goods; someone in quality reads each against the spec, types the values into the QMS and files the PDF. It bites hardest when the admin clerk leaves — the playbook names labour shortages in administrative roles — and both queues become one person's.

What changes

What Monday looks like after

Half past seven on the receiving dock. The morning's deliveries already have their certificates read and, where every value sits inside the spec, entered in the QMS; the buyer's screen shows the overnight POs from the regular suppliers already in the ERP with confirmations gone. What waits for a person is the review list: an unknown part number, a supplier nobody has ordered from, a value outside tolerance — in the composite, roughly two dozen lines a day out of two hundred. The clerk and the quality engineer are still there; the reading and the retyping are not. At audit time you search for a certificate instead of opening a cupboard.

Typical, not a measured client result. Every figure here comes from the playbook source named below.

~88%

of PO lines can go through without a person. ~12% stay human.

Before: a clerk reads ~200 POs a day against the catalogue and the spec. After: roughly 88% of lines can pass with no human touch — the ~12% of exceptions become the person's whole job.

Where this number comes from

Composite from the manufacturing playbook mini-case (~200 POs/day flow). Industry benchmarks: Deloitte Procurement Analytics 2022 (40–55% less manual PO handling); SAP/Siemens 2023 quality-document studies (50–65% less review time).

What we install

What we put in front of the systems you already run

Your ERP and QMS stay — SAP S/4HANA, Oracle, Dynamics or Infor; SAP QM, ETQ, MasterControl or Veeva; or whatever you run. Two reading steps go in front of them:

PO lines are extracted from the email, PDF or EDI message and matched to your supplier catalogue and budget line
matching lines are written into the ERP through its interface and the confirmation generated
the certificate arriving with the goods is read, each value compared to the material spec
in-spec values are entered into the QMS and the PDF filed where an auditor can find it
non-standard items, new suppliers and out-of-spec values land on one review list.

The suppliers sending the most lines come first.

What stays human — and what this will not do

New suppliers. Non-standard parts. Budget exceptions. Non-conformance. The conversation with the vendor. Audit answers that need a sentence, not a tick.

What can go wrong — and what we do about it

A supplier changes its PDF layout without telling you, and the new template fails extraction until it is taught — those lines wait for a person rather than being guessed. An out-of-date supplier catalogue means a long review list for the first weeks, because routine lines fail the match. Small suppliers send scans and sometimes fax; reading quality drops there, and they will be over-represented in the composite's ~12% exceptions. The Deloitte 40–55% range covers standard PO lines; new suppliers, non-standard parts and budget exceptions are not in it.

How long it takes, and what we need from you

Audit, about two weeks (€1.5–3K): we sit with the PO clerk and the quality team, count lines by supplier and channel — email, EDI, fax — and check how your ERP and QMS accept entries. Pilot, 3–5 weeks (€10–20K) — the manufacturing playbook rates both processes medium complexity: the highest-volume suppliers, every exception reviewed by your people. Production: the long tail of smaller suppliers, one at a time. From you: mailbox access, the catalogue export, the material specs, a month of POs and certificates.

The path: free 60-second estimate → free 20-minute review → paid audit of this one process (€1.5–3K, typically two weeks) → pilot with your people in the loop (€10–20K, weeks, not quarters). No transformation programme. Prices are public, on the services page →

This is about you if…

Do POs and certificates still arrive as emails, PDFs or faxes that somebody retypes?
Is the supplier catalogue in the ERP current, or does the clerk know it by heart?
Are material specs written down per part, so a certificate can be compared to something?

What does this mean in euros?

That depends on your volumes and wage costs — this page will not invent the number. The free 60-second estimate runs that calculation from your answers, with every multiplier sourced.

Get your free savings estimate 60 seconds · no sales call Or write first → Map a manufacturing process like this one — free, 60 seconds →

Not a named Aperanda client. Example · Manufacturing.

Deep-dive process file. Volumes, weeks and sources come from the industry playbook; nothing here is a named client.

All process files