When an SMC account representative was asked to use SourceDay for one of his largest customers, he was not starting from a blank slate.
He already had a system. In fact, he had four: spreadsheets, email, phone calls, and text messages. Together, they helped him manage purchase orders, acknowledgments, changes, and customer communication. They also required constant cross-checking.
The customer’s new process could have become a fifth system. Instead, it replaced much of that manual coordination. The representative learned SourceDay in about an hour and estimated that it saved him at least an hour each day.
That story captures an important lesson about supplier adoption. Suppliers are not waiting for buyers to give them more software. They are trying to keep orders current across many customers, each with its own expectations and workflows.
Procurement teams get better participation when they meet suppliers where they work, give them a clear reason to engage, and bring every response into one controlled process on the buyer side.
The view from the supplier’s desk
Buyer-side process design often starts with a reasonable goal: centralize supplier communication. The procurement team wants acknowledgments, commit dates, quantity changes, and pricing updates in one place instead of scattered across inboxes and spreadsheets.
The supplier sees the same rollout from a different angle.
A supplier may serve dozens or hundreds of customers. Each customer can have its own portal, login, terminology, response deadlines, and rules. A process that feels centralized to one buyer can feel fragmented to the supplier.
That was the reality for SMC Corporation of America. Kenny Zielinski, an account representative, received as many as eight POs per day from one customer alone. Each order could include several lines, different specifications, changing dates, and ongoing communication.
His existing combination of tools worked, but it limited how quickly he could see open orders, respond to changes, and keep a complete history. SourceDay gave him a shared view with the customer and reduced the daily work required to reconcile information.
The value was not that SMC had complied with a customer mandate. The value was that the new process made the supplier’s work easier too.
Suppliers rarely resist collaboration itself
When supplier adoption stalls, the easy conclusion is that suppliers resist change. Customer stories point to a different pattern.
Suppliers generally want fewer missed requests, clearer priorities, faster answers, and less uncertainty about what the customer expects. What they resist is additional work that duplicates the tools and processes already filling their day.
DuraMark expected some suppliers to hesitate when it introduced SourceDay. According to Business Systems Analyst Eric Douglass, several suppliers the team expected to resist were among the first to say they wanted to participate.
That response makes sense when the new process solves a problem on both sides. A supplier benefits when it can see open work, respond without reconstructing the PO history, document what changed, and reduce repetitive status requests from the buyer.
Adoption improves when participation has direct operating value. Training and reminders still matter, but they cannot compensate for a process that makes the supplier’s work harder.
Growth exposes the limits of informal coordination
For a small supplier base, procurement teams can often keep the process moving through personal follow-up. Buyers know whom to email. Suppliers know which spreadsheet to return. Exceptions are resolved through calls and individual relationships.
That model becomes harder to sustain as the business grows.
ARES Tool began with three suppliers and about 400 items. At that scale, the team could manage purchase orders through emails and signed PDFs. As ARES expanded to 20 suppliers and nearly 800 items, the same process became unmanageable.
The team did not simply need a better buyer interface. It needed a process its suppliers could use consistently, including suppliers whose first language was not English.
After implementation, ARES reported a 151% increase in supplier acknowledgment, a 36% increase in supplier engagement, and a 70% improvement in on-time delivery.
The lesson is not that every supplier must use the same screen. It is that growth requires a dependable way to capture supplier commitments without depending on buyer memory and individual follow-up.
Meeting suppliers where they work is not the same as leaving work in email
Procurement teams sometimes hear “meet suppliers where they work” as an argument for accepting whatever communication arrives through email, phone, PDF, or spreadsheet.
That is not the goal.
Email is familiar, but an inbox is not a shared system of record. A buyer may see a date change that planning does not. A supplier may believe a price adjustment was accepted when procurement is still reviewing it. A forwarded attachment can separate the latest update from the rest of the PO history.
Meeting suppliers where they work means making participation flexible while keeping the resulting commitments structured and visible.
The supplier may respond through an interactive email workflow, a supplier portal, EDI, an API, or another supported method. The buyer should still receive a current response tied to the correct PO and line. Proposed changes should still follow review rules. Approved updates should still reach the ERP.
The supplier’s path can vary. The buyer’s control should not.
Sportsman Boats saw the difference during disruption
The practical value of adoption becomes easiest to see when conditions change quickly.
During the pandemic-era demand surge, Sportsman Boats was managing daily changes across hundreds of suppliers and thousands of parts. Lead times and pricing moved frequently. Email responses could be blocked by domain blacklists, leaving the team unsure whether suppliers had received or answered important requests.
Sportsman Boats used easy onboarding, interactive email responses, dashboards, and human support to bring suppliers into a more dependable process. Seventy percent of its suppliers became active in SourceDay.
Systems Manager Cole Wilson described the operational difference plainly: the suppliers already participating did not miss a beat when disruption intensified. The company went on to report 99% date accuracy, a 66% reduction in safety stock, and no production downtime from missing parts while the business was growing 40%.
Those results were not created by a login rate. They came from having supplier commitments the business could trust.
The strongest adoption programs create value on both sides
A supplier participation strategy should answer two questions:
- What does the buyer need to keep planning and execution current?
- What does the supplier gain by participating consistently?
For the buyer, the answer usually includes reliable acknowledgments, current delivery dates, visible change requests, and accurate ERP data.
For the supplier, the benefits are more practical:
- Fewer status emails and repeated requests.
- A clearer list of orders requiring action.
- Less time reconstructing what changed.
- A shared record when buyer and supplier expectations differ.
- Faster resolution of price, quantity, and delivery questions.
- Better visibility across the customer account.
That shared value changes the adoption conversation. The supplier is not being asked to help the buyer automate. Both parties are replacing a process that creates avoidable work and uncertainty.
Ag Leader connected adoption to customer delivery
Ag Leader provides a useful example of what happens when supplier participation becomes part of the operating model rather than a rollout task.
Before SourceDay, buyers spent hours chasing updates, supplier communication was fragmented, and unreliable ERP data contributed to excess inventory. Customer on-time delivery stood at 76%. Ag Leader reached 100% adoption among its strategic suppliers. Customer on-time delivery increased to 99%, while inventory fell 32%, releasing millions in working capital.
Supplier adoption was not the end result. It was the condition that made more reliable planning and customer delivery possible.
This is why the most useful adoption metric is not the number of suppliers invited or trained. It is the percentage of supplier commitments arriving on time, staying current, and reaching the people and systems that depend on them.
What “meet suppliers where they work” should mean in practice
A flexible supplier collaboration model follows a few practical principles.
- Start with the supplier’s volume and capability. A high-volume supplier with mature systems may benefit from EDI, an API, bulk updates, and dashboards. A lower-volume supplier may need a fast email-based response with no separate login. The appropriate method depends on the relationship. Requiring the most advanced connection for every supplier can delay participation without improving the underlying commitment.
- Keep the process simple enough to repeat. Suppliers need to acknowledge new POs and respond when dates, prices, or quantities change. If the workflow is difficult to remember or requires too many steps, the conversation will return to email and phone calls. Adoption is not proved during training. It is proved the next time an order changes.
- Give suppliers a useful view of their work. Participation is easier to sustain when suppliers can see which orders are open, which lines require action, what the buyer changed, and where a response is overdue. Visibility should reduce supplier effort rather than simply improve buyer reporting.
- Provide human support. Supplier bases change. Contacts leave. Responsibilities move. A supplier may need help after months of routine participation when an unusual order or new workflow appears. A proven adoption process includes onboarding and ongoing support, rather than placing the full burden on the buying team.
- Bring every method into one controlled buyer process. Flexibility should not create several disconnected versions of the truth. Regardless of how the supplier responds, the buyer needs one place to manage confirmations, review changes, maintain history, and keep the ERP aligned with accepted commitments.
- Document-first suppliers are part of the same story. Some suppliers will continue to work through order confirmations, spreadsheets, and other emailed documents because those files come directly from their existing systems. That does not make them poor partners. It means the collaboration model needs another practical entry point. Document processing can help convert familiar supplier responses into structured workflow inputs. The same control principle still applies: reading a document is not permission to accept every change it contains. Parsed dates, prices, quantities, and shipment details need to be matched to the PO, validated, and routed for buyer review when appropriate. This extends the idea of meeting suppliers where they work without turning an emailed document into an uncontrolled path to the ERP.
The case is ultimately about predictability
Procurement teams cannot create dependable supplier execution by designing only for their own systems. Suppliers have different volumes, technical capabilities, staffing models, and customer requirements. A rigid participation model may work for some while leaving the rest of the supplier base in manual follow-up.
The common pattern is not a portal. It is establishing a collaboration process that suppliers can realistically use and buyers can reliably govern.
Start by segmenting suppliers by how they work today, then identify the lowest-friction participation method that can still produce a current, controlled commitment. The objective is not to make every supplier work the same way. It is to make every supplier response useful to the business.
See how SourceDay supports supplier collaboration across different supplier workflows.
FAQs
What does it mean to meet suppliers where they work?
It means supporting participation methods that fit a supplier’s volume, systems, and daily workflow while bringing the resulting acknowledgments and changes into one controlled process for the buyer.
Why do suppliers resist procurement portals?
Suppliers often manage different portals and requirements for many customers. Resistance usually increases when a new portal duplicates existing work, adds another login, or provides little direct value to the supplier.
Does flexible supplier participation mean keeping procurement in email?
No. Email can be one supplier interface, but responses should still be captured, tied to the correct PO, governed through appropriate review rules, and reflected in the buyer’s shared system.
How can procurement improve supplier adoption?
Reduce onboarding friction, offer appropriate participation options, make required actions clear, show suppliers the value they receive, provide ongoing support, and measure whether commitments remain current after rollout.
How should supplier adoption be measured?
Useful measures include acknowledgment rate, response time, percentage of supplier changes captured, commit-date accuracy, active participation over time, and the speed at which accepted commitments reach the ERP.
Can document processing help meet suppliers where they work?
Yes. Document processing can capture data from supplier confirmations and spreadsheets without requiring every supplier to adopt the same interface. The workflow still needs validation, buyer approval for material changes, and controlled ERP updates.
