How Much Time Should Procurement Actually Spend on Supplier Chasing?

If you walk into the procurement department of most small-to-medium enterprises and ask what takes up the bulk of their day, you will likely hear a collective sigh before they answer: chasing suppliers.

Whether it is waiting on purchase order confirmations, hunting down tracking numbers, or trying to figure out if a critical delivery is going to be delayed, "just following up" has become a full-time job.

But how much time should your team actually spend on supplier chasing?

In a traditional, manual setup, procurement professionals often spend 20% to 30% of their workweek — sometimes up to two full days — just trying to get answers from vendors. However, the ideal target for high-performing, modern procurement teams is under 5%.

Here is why that gap exists, what it is costing your business, and how you can close it.

The Hidden Cost of the "Did You Get This?" Email

When your procurement officers are stuck playing phone tag or managing endless spreadsheet updates, your business bleeds resources in three major ways:

Opportunity Cost: Every hour spent asking, "Where is my order?" is an hour not spent on strategic sourcing, negotiating better terms, or evaluating new, resilient suppliers.

Production Bottlenecks: When a critical component is delayed and the team does not find out until the delivery date, operations grind to a halt. Reactive tracking means you are always putting out fires instead of preventing them.

Employee Burnout: Talented professionals despise doing rote administrative tasks. Forcing skilled staff to act as manual follow-up alarms reduces job satisfaction and increases turnover.

Moving from Reactive to Automated

To get that supplier chasing metric down from 30% to 5%, businesses have to fundamentally shift how they manage purchase orders.

In a reactive system, you are blind until the supplier replies to an email. The trigger for action relies entirely on a human buyer remembering to check a spreadsheet. In an automated system, visibility is real-time. The system automatically nudges the supplier at key milestones, allowing your team to focus exclusively on managing the exceptions rather than routine data entry.

But there is a catch.

The Missing Link: AI-Native PO Tracking

To truly get supplier follow-up time down to zero, basic automation is not always enough. Traditional procurement tools rely on rigid, rules-based triggers. If a supplier replies with anything other than a perfectly formatted standard confirmation, human intervention is still required.

This is where the industry has historically fallen short — until now.

Currently, there are no other procurement SaaS vendors providing a truly AI-native mechanism specifically built for chasing suppliers and tracking purchase orders. Instead of just firing off automated emails, an AI-native approach understands context, interprets natural supplier responses, and intelligently escalates only the actual exceptions to your team.

It bridges the gap between passive tracking and active, intelligent management. For a deeper look at how this works, read The Ultimate Guide to Purchase Order Automation.

Automate Your POs Today — For Free

Enterprise-grade automation should not be locked behind enterprise-level pricing, and you should not have to accept supplier chasing as a "necessary evil" of doing business.

NudgePro is the only platform providing an AI-native mechanism for chasing suppliers — and we are now making this feature accessible to everyone for free. Reclaim 20% of your workweek without adding a single line item to your budget. Let intelligent automation handle your routine check-ins so your procurement team can get back to driving real value.

Stop chasing and start tracking today. Get your free access at nudgepro.com.au.