Procurement teams keep supply chains moving, but manual workflows can quietly slow progress and inflate costs. Drawing from market data and real-world examples, this article breaks down the five most common process inefficiencies that undermine procurement success and briefly shows how AI Agents purpose-built for supply chains can eliminate them.
If procurement was part of a ship’s crew, they’d be the navigators and quartermasters charting the course, managing supplies, and ensuring the ship reaches its destination on time and fully stocked. When they work efficiently, the whole vessel runs smoothly. When they’re bogged down in errors, delays ripple through every deck.
The 2024 State of Procurement Survey confirms that 56% of procurement departments struggle with process inefficiencies. It’s not lack of effort. In fact, procurement teams are often juggling a growing list of tasks, projects, and transformation initiatives. Ironically, in the quest to make them more efficient, the workload expands, stretching teams thin and slowing real progress.
Below are five vulnerabilities that consistently throw procurement off course, backed by market data and industry insight.
Procurement departments work with endless spreadsheets, paper forms, and email chains to move information between systems.
When all the information or most of it is handled manually, a lot of human errors surface through duplicate orders, incorrect quantities, missed approvals, and payment mistakes. On a ship, this is like loading the wrong cargo and discovering the mistake when you’re already at sea.
A Deloitte survey of CPOs found that the state of internal IT and AI capabilities (particularly in the context of integrating Generative AI with existing tools) is the top barrier to digital procurement. Poor data quality is the second-largest internal barrier to digital procurement.
Manual data entry creates unreliable records, while fragmented data infrastructure keeps procurement from fully automating. In fact, cleaning and structuring data is a pre-requisite for automation success.
In many organizations, purchase orders crawl through multi-layer approval chains. Managers are overloaded, escalation paths are unclear, and approvals can sit idle for days – especially when one missing piece of information holds up the chain.
A Gartner survey found that 42% of procurement leaders cite supply disruption as a major risk, and late approvals are one way those disruptions start. Without timely sign-off, procurement teams can’t adjust schedules or trigger follow-ups.
In a volatile supply market, these delays ripple into late orders, missed opportunities, and production slowdowns. Without timely sign-off, procurement teams can’t adjust schedules or trigger follow-ups. It’s like having your ship ready to sail, but waiting for a dozen signatures before you can leave port.
Overpayments often occur during invoice reconciliation - the very process meant to prevent them.
With hundreds of suppliers and thousands of purchase orders, manual reconciliation is a monumental task, making it easy to overlook discrepancies. This leads to duplicate payments, supplier disputes, and revenue leakage.
It’s like paying the same shipment twice because the logbook wasn’t checked carefully.
In procurement, exceptions are inevitable - from unit mismatches and last-minute price changes to business logic that changes with every supplier.
With hundreds of suppliers to manage – and the bigger they are, the less flexible they tend to be - each irregularity becomes a slow-moving obstacle. Because it demands manual investigation and customization, cycle times stretch, scaling stalls, and teams burn out.
It’s like stopping the ship every time a wave hits.
Procurement’s work depends on constant communication – with suppliers, internal requestors, finance, and logistics. When updates are scattered across email threads, ad-hoc calls, and siloed systems, critical information slips through the cracks.
It’s like having the ship’s crew shouting course corrections from different decks, in different languages and at different times – by the time the message reaches the captain, the wind has changed. Deadlines get missed, opportunities passed, and small problems grow into costly issues.
Manual procurement errors - from inaccurate POs to slow exception handling - cost time, money, and trust.
AI Agents purpose-built for procurement automate validation, document matching, and exception resolution, directly integrating with ERP and supply chain systems. When teams orchestrate agent-driven workflows, they get faster cycles, fewer errors, better supplier relationships, and a procurement function that runs at full speed.
This is where procurement automation, AI-driven workflows, and vertical AI Agents intersect to deliver measurable ROI.
Tomaz is the Co-founder and Co-CEO of Nordoon, a company building AI Agents to automate and optimize non-EDI transactions across supply chains. He holds a PhD in Mechanical Engineering and has lectured at academic institutions including MIT. Prior to Nordoon, he held leadership roles such as CRO at Qlector, CEO & Cofounder of Senzemo, and Co-founder of AgriSense.
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