PO confirmation tracking
Every open PO line, checked before you open a spreadsheet
Purchase order confirmation is the check that decides whether the rest of the month goes to plan. Automated, it runs on 10,000 lines before anyone reaches their desk.
Today
The six steps this removes
Nothing here needs judgement. Every one of them is the same sequence, run again tomorrow on a different day's data.
- Step 1
SAP
Pull today's open PO data
- Step 2
Excel Download
Export the extract into a spreadsheet
- Step 3
Manual Checking
PO confirmation · Plant · Status · ASN · Delivery date
- Step 4
Pivot / Filter
Confirmed · Pending · ASN missing · Late · Supplier-wise
- Step 5
Manual Review
Decide which POs need action today
- Step 6
Supplier Follow-up
Identify supplier · Prepare data · Send email
On 10,000 PO lines that sequence runs to roughly sixteen hours. The step-by-step calculation is here.
The check
What counts as confirmed, and what counts as pending
Confirmation is not one rule but three, because ‘not confirmed yet’ and ‘not confirmed and the delivery date is next week’ are different problems.
| Rule | Condition in SAP | Flag |
|---|---|---|
| PO Confirmed | Supplier confirmation date present in SAP | Confirmed |
| Confirmation Pending | No confirmation after X days of PO date | Pending |
| Coming Soon | Delivery date within the next N days | Due soon |
The pending threshold is yours to set — how many days after the PO date counts as late for a confirmation depends on your category and your suppliers.
Ageing
A pending confirmation is only as bad as it is old
The same 215 exceptions look very different once you ask how long each one has been sitting there. This is the distribution the daily run produces.
33% of open lines
28% of open lines
23% of open lines
15% of open lines
38% of pending lines are more than a week old. Those are the ones a manual pass keeps missing, because a spreadsheet sorted by PO number puts them nowhere near the top. Ordering by age and value is what exception management is for.
Before the rules run
Eight validation checks, so a flag is never a data error
A rules engine on dirty data produces confident nonsense. Every line clears these before it is judged.
- PO number valid
- Supplier present
- Plant present
- PO date valid
- Delivery date valid
- Confirmation status available
- ASN present
- No duplicate PO line
Rows that fail land in a data quality report with the reason attached, rather than being silently dropped or silently flagged.
Related
The rest of the same run
These are not separate products. One scheduled job produces all of it — each page just follows a different thread through the same data.
ASN Tracking
ASN present, ASN missing and late delivery — flagged while there is still time to act.
Read moreException Management
Exceptions ranked critical to normal, each with the value sitting behind it.
Read moreSupplier Follow-up Automation
Follow-up drafts, an audit log, and a scorecard that builds itself.
Read moreOr start from the beginning: the full platform, the time and ROI calculation or AI & business automation beyond procurement.
Run it on your own PO extract
Send a sample from one plant. In 30 minutes you will see exactly what the rules engine flags on your data — not a slide deck about someone else’s.
Book a demo