Why email won

Your ERP doesn't run your supply chain. Outlook does.

90% of PO confirmations still arrive by email. The residual costs land as corrections and expedites, and as missed OTIF targets that put customer relationships at risk. The cost sits with the person who has to read that mail and retype it into the ERP.

What the ERP cannot tell you

That's why supply chain leaders can't easily answer these questions: Did the supplier confirm the PO? Is the promised date still accurate? Did we validate quantity and pricing?

If your team can answer these confidently without searching the inbox, your supply chain organization is ahead of the game.

However, for most leaders, the reality is different. Despite having the best-of-breed ERPs and MRPs, procurement teams still sift through messy inboxes to find critical information while the core system stays out of sync.

Direct procurement has been operating even with these problems for decades. None of this is news to anyone. The industry has tried, repeatedly, to fix the status quo. Portals didn't work. EDI covers only strategic suppliers.

Why the portal stays empty

I've yet to meet a supplier who looks forward to logging into a customer portal. Most procurement leaders will tell you the same. And yet, portals keep getting implemented.

A mid-sized supplier works with 50, 100, sometimes 200+ customers. Each customer has their own portal, their own login, their own way of doing things. The portal works well for the customer. For the supplier, it's 200 extra jobs on top of their actual job. So they simply send an email.

EDI was supposed to fill the gap. But it only works well for strategic partners as it requires IT investments on both sides, and takes months to implement per supplier.

One company I spoke with integrated SAP Ariba to standardize confirmations for direct materials. Within months, teams drifted back to emailing the moment an exception came up.

Coverage, not connectivity

The pattern is consistent across the industry: EDI handles strategic partners. Portals handle a fraction of the rest. Email handles everyone else.

The suppliers are too small to justify an EDI integration, too low-priority for a portal rollout, or too transactional to warrant the effort. For both sides, the cost of integration outweighs the cost of just sending an email.

Emails become the default because they're the only tool that works for every supplier, as they require zero training and handle exceptions.

Where the time actually goes

The question was never how to get suppliers off email. The problem is what happens after it lands in the inbox: a human reading unstructured data, inferring context, and manually updating the ERP. That's where the time goes. AI eliminates exactly that.

Buyers spend 60-70% of their day on manual tasks. Portals and EDI both asked the process to be tidier than it actually is.

Artificial intelligence addresses the complex reality of most procurement organizations in a way no other technology has. Its strength lies in exactly what others missed: master data is incomplete, duplicated, and unformatted; suppliers reply with free text, PDFs, and Excel spreadsheets; and internal processes deviate across teams, locations, and product lines.

An AI agent operates within the same inbox buyers already use, reads supplier replies in any format, cross-references them against the original PO, flags mismatches, follows up autonomously if something is off, and updates the ERP in real time.

I put together a report on how manufacturers are automating this work. It includes a breakdown of how a $1.5B manufacturer eliminated up to $3.1M in annual downstream costs, and it covers each cost layer in depth.

The report is here if you want the numbers.

First published on LinkedIn on 26 June 2026.