Two to five hours a week for the buyer and the finance clerk who reconstructs the purchase order after the invoice arrives, plus stock and cost data the ERP can no longer be trusted on. The purchasing module is dormant: set up, licensed and skipped.
Last reviewed 30 September 2026
In the strata, dormant. Orders go to suppliers by email or phone, the goods arrive, and the purchase order is created afterwards so the invoice can be matched. Every downstream report that relies on committed spend is wrong by exactly the size of that gap.
A supplier master that was never cleaned, so half the suppliers exist twice and the buyer can't find the right one. Underneath that, approval limits set at go-live that nobody has raised since, so the module blocks ordinary orders.
A process fix first: clean the supplier master and set the limits to match the delegation document. Only then plain automation, raising the purchase order from the buyer's email or the reorder point. AI earns its place only for reading supplier quotes out of PDFs.
Purchase orders dated after their invoices, pulled from the ERP as they are, give the size of the bypass. The hours come from watching the clerk reconstruct one week's orders. The lower figure wins. How EMBR measures. This layer is one part of workaround debt; The Transect measures all of them together.
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