Every quote, order and delivery lived in someone's inbox, and no one could say where a part stood.

An India-based manufacturer with more than 400 suppliers ran its supplier work through email, spreadsheets and follow-up calls. We built one portal for quotes, orders, shipments, scorecards and audits, piloted it in stages and took it live for every supplier and internal team.

Client: An India-based manufacturer
Scale: 400+ suppliers and four internal departments
Engagement: About 10 months to build, a 1.5-month staged pilot, then ongoing support

The outcome in five lines

The outcome in five lines
Measure	Before	After	Evidence
Where a part's status lives1	email threads and spreadsheets, updated by hand	one record per inquiry, order and shipment, showing whose turn it is	Described
Supplier performance2	not scored	scored monthly per supplier on on-time delivery, document conformity and rejections, with rejections counting most	Described
Supplier system audits3	dates tracked and chased by hand	started each night on their date, a reminder a day before, and corrective-action reminders until the documents are in	Described
A delivery at the gate4	the gate kept its own register	one shipment record runs from the supplier through the gate, the warehouse and quality checks	Described
An approval on a quote or sample5	given by email, with no trail	recorded against the person assigned to that part	Described

Each line describes how the work runs now against how it ran before. The small number beside each line says where it comes from.

The problem, in the client's terms

Supplier work ran on email, spreadsheets and manual follow-up. A quote went out by email, prices came back in attachments, purchase orders and delivery dates were agreed in replies, and someone kept a sheet of what was still open. By the team's own estimate, getting a part from inquiry to an approved price took two to three weeks of back and forth.

No one had a single view of where a part stood, so a late quote or a missed delivery surfaced only when the goods failed to arrive. And when a price, a sample or a rejected batch was questioned later, there was no audit trail to show who had decided what.

Quality work sat on the same footing. Supplier audits depended on someone remembering the date, corrective actions were chased by hand, and a truck could reach the gate with nothing in the system to say what it carried or which documents should come with it.

ConstraintEvery approval had to trace to the person assigned to that part, not just to anyone holding the same role.
ConstraintMore than 400 suppliers had to use it, most of them outside the client's own systems.
ConstraintThe portal had to stand alone. Purchase orders are raised in the client's existing system and uploaded, so nothing depended on an integration project.

The architecture, before and after

Switch between the two. The status of every order moved out of inboxes and spreadsheets into one portal, and the gate stopped keeping its own register.

Before. Suppliers and teams talk by email, status lives in spreadsheets, the gate keeps its own book.

After. One portal carries every inquiry, order and shipment, with the team whose turn it is shown.

What hurt in this state
Built in this engagement

Three decisions, and what we turned down

Each of these replaced a hand-off that used to depend on someone remembering. Each one names what it replaced and what it cost.

1
How an approved quote becomes a sample order
- Turned down
  Purchase creates the sample order by hand after approval
  Re-keying the part, supplier and agreed cost invites errors, and the new order loses its link to the inquiry that produced it.
- Chosen
  The portal creates the sample order the moment final approval is given
  The order carries the approved supplier, part and cost straight from the quote, and every sample order can be traced back to its inquiry.
What it cost: A price approved by mistake now creates a real order, so correcting it means closing that order and raising a fresh inquiry, not editing a line.
2
Who remembers when a supplier is due for an audit
- Turned down
  The quality team tracks due dates in a spreadsheet and chases by email
  An audit happens only if someone remembers it, and corrective actions stall once the chasing stops.
- Chosen
  A nightly job starts each audit on its date and sends the reminders
  Each night the portal starts the audits due that day, reminds the supplier a day before the next one, and repeats the corrective-action reminder until the documents are uploaded.
What it cost: Audit timing now depends on a scheduled job being healthy, so a missed night has to catch up on the next one. A supplier who has never been audited has no next date, so the first audit is still started by hand.
3
Where a delivery is recorded when it reaches the gate
- Turned down
  The gate keeps its own register
  A short quantity or a rejected certificate found later could not be traced to the shipment it came on.
- Chosen
  One advance shipping notice runs from the supplier to the gate, the warehouse and quality
  Gate entry, the warehouse count and the quality document checks all sit on one shipment record, and the turn passes from team to team by status.
What it cost: Suppliers do more work before the truck leaves. Invoice, delivery challan, e-way bill and quality documents are uploaded up front, and a document rejected at the gate sends the shipment back to the supplier until a corrected copy is in.

How it was delivered

Build the whole supplier journey first, then let it carry real work in stages before every supplier joined.

Build
About 10 months covering master data, roles and permissions, supplier onboarding, inquiries, sample and bulk orders, shipments and receiving, scorecards and audits.
Staged pilot
A 1.5-month pilot, internal teams first, then a group of suppliers, before go-live for everyone.
Go-live for everyone
More than 400 suppliers onboarded and all four departments working in the portal.
Close support
One month of close support after go-live, followed by ongoing maintenance and support.

Who owns what now

A user manual for every module, one month of close support after go-live, then ongoing maintenance and support.

Results

What changed for the people doing the work. The numbers that prove it will come from the portal itself once it has run for a few months.

Purchase, Planning and Job Development see every inquiry, sample and order in one list with its status, instead of searching inboxes.
Quality audits start on their own date, and corrective actions are chased by the portal, not by email.
Security and Warehouse know what a truck carries before it arrives, and work from the same shipment record.
Suppliers see their own scorecard with exactly the figures the client sees.

The portal has only just gone live for every user, so on-time delivery, quote turnaround and the time teams spend following up are not measured yet. The portal's own scorecard and dashboard will supply those numbers.

What chasing suppliers costs you today

We do not publish what an engagement costs. So this works from your side: what your team spends following up quotes, orders and deliveries by email and phone.

Cost of following up by hand, per year

$13,000

Hours spent following up, per year: 520 h

What went wrong, and what we would change

Suppliers pushed back on another portal

Suppliers saw a long profile to complete and documents to upload to a system they had not asked for. What brought them on board was the staged pilot, where a first group used it before everyone else, simple single-use invite links that an administrator can resend, and seeing their own scorecard with the same figures the client sees. Next time we would show suppliers their scorecard in the first conversation, because that is what made the effort worth it to them.

The first scorecard left too many cases undefined

Generating scorecards exposed gaps in the original requirement. A score exactly on a band boundary, a delivery not yet due, and a delivery date the supplier had revised could each be read two ways. We sat down with the client's team, studied their past delivery and rejection records, and rewrote the rules together. A boundary score falls to the lower band, pending lines count in the total, and on-time is always judged against the date first committed. Next time we would write the scoring rules against real past data before building the screen.

Will this work for your supply side?

It fits when

You buy from dozens or hundreds of suppliers, and the same handful of people chase all of them.
Parts go through a sample and approval stage before bulk orders, so a quote has a long life.
Quality, stores and purchasing all touch the same delivery and argue later about what arrived.

Look elsewhere when

You buy from a few suppliers you speak to every day. A shared tracker may be enough.
Your ERP already has a supplier module your suppliers will actually use. Extend it first.
Your suppliers have no email or no one to upload documents. A portal will sit unused.

Check it yourself this week

If the answer takes more than a few minutes and more than one person, the coordination is the problem. Put your follow-up count into the calculator above.

Pick five open purchase orders at random.
For each, find the agreed delivery date and who approved the price.
Time how long it takes, and count how many inboxes or sheets you opened.

How it is built, by layer

PortalOne web application for internal teams and suppliers, with a dashboard per department
AccessEmail and password, then a one-time code by email; permissions per role and per part
AutomationA nightly scheduler for audits and reminders, and status emails at every hand-off
DataA records database and document storage for purchase orders, invoices, QA reports and corrective-action files
HostingA cloud environment we set up for the client
IntegrationsNone; purchase orders are raised in the client's existing system and uploaded

How each figure was measured

How the portal works now, compared with how the client's teams worked before it.
The scorecard rules in the portal, agreed with the client's team from past delivery and rejection records.
The audit schedule the portal runs each night.
The shipment record that replaced the gate's separate register.
The approval rules in the portal, which tie each decision on a part to the people assigned to it.

Tell us how many suppliers you chase each week, and we will tell you whether a portal fits.

Send the supplier count and how your team tracks open orders today. A software engineer reads it and replies with an honest answer, including when a shared tracker or your ERP is the better choice.

Send your supplier numbers See how we build custom software