The System Is Live. Why Is the Purchase Still Waiting?
An ERP implementation can reach its launch date while leaving the most consequential operational delays intact. A purchase request may enter the new system immediately, then wait for someone with the authority to approve it. Production and warehouse teams may continue using separate spreadsheets because those tools still provide the context needed to get work done. The test of improvement is whether the complete process becomes faster and more reliable, including the handoffs between departments.
Measure speed and accuracy together
Andy Brabender, Chief Revenue Officer at Rootstock Software, recommends evaluating cycle time alongside transaction accuracy. His comments followed the company’s announcement of a partnership with Nucleo focused on ERP adoption and change management. The distinction is practical: faster processing provides limited benefit if picking mistakes, inventory corrections or other errors generate additional work downstream. Measuring both dimensions helps distinguish a useful operational improvement from a faster way of creating exceptions.
“Many manufacturers want to know whether combining ERP technology with hands-on change management can really improve performance,” Brabender said in written responses to The Supply Chainer. “To answer that, I’d recommend looking at two measures together. The first is cycle time: how long does it take to complete a production order or move an order through the warehouse? The second is transaction accuracy, including picking errors and inventory corrections.”
“Speed means little if employees are still dealing with mistakes, so both need to improve together,” he continued. “Ultimately, the improvements to look for are shorter cycle times, fewer errors, and more predictable execution.” That requires a baseline against which subsequent performance can be compared. It also requires an agreed process boundary, because reducing the time spent in one department can conceal a longer wait elsewhere.
The approval queue is part of the operating process
Michael Petter, Director at Eyvo, identifies the transfer from the manager who understands an urgent requirement to the next budget owner or policy approver as a particular vulnerability. The request can lose its operational context as it moves between people with different responsibilities. If the designated approver is unavailable, the business may have a recorded request without an effective route to a decision. Petter’s proposed response preserves financial controls while making ownership and elapsed time visible.
“An urgent operational purchase is most likely to stall at the handoff from the manager who understands the immediate need to the next budget owner or policy approver,” Petter said in response to The Supply Chainer’s inquiry. “At that point, important context can be lost, and the request may simply sit in a queue - particularly when the designated approver is unavailable. Our systems at Eyvo are precisely designed to avoid that bottleneck. The practical fix is a visible, time-bound exception process: show who owns the approval and how long it has been waiting, notify the appropriate person, and use a pre-authorized delegate or escalation path when an agreed time limit is reached.”
The proposed mechanism needs operating rules as well as software configuration. An escalation threshold has limited value if the substitute approver lacks authority or cannot see why the purchase is urgent. Equally, an urgent label should not remove spending limits, required approvals or the audit trail. The objective is to reduce unattended waiting while keeping the decision accountable.
Adoption has to survive the next shift
Chad Fox, Manager and Delivery Lead at Miebach Consulting, told The Supply Chainer in response to an earlier inquiry that accumulated operating differences across sites can be a greater barrier to warehouse-system standardization than the platform itself. He distinguished genuine business requirements from complexity inherited through local workarounds and historical habits. That observation helps explain why a technically consistent implementation can still produce inconsistent execution. If each team retains a different exception process, the enterprise has standardized its software more successfully than its operations.
Brabender’s adoption test is whether employees consistently use the new workflows, record transactions as work happens and resolve problems without reverting to separate tracking tools. Those behaviours make delays and errors visible soon enough for supervisors to intervene. They also expose whether the designed process works under everyday pressure, rather than only during training or launch support. A completed implementation becomes an operational improvement when the purchase, approval and execution chain works reliably across shifts.
