Picture a consumer packaged goods manufacturer where supplier problems are rarely sudden. A lead time creeps up a few days at a time. An on-time rate slips a percentage point a month. A price drifts past what an approval workflow was originally built around. Each of those signals is usually visible in the data weeks before it becomes a missed shipment - the issue is that nobody's watching all of it continuously against thresholds that are actually specific to that supplier and that risk tolerance.
Most procurement teams find out about a problem after it's already cost them something: a scramble for an alternate source, a production delay, a hard conversation with a customer. By then, the early signal that could have prevented it is old news.
This workflow tracks supplier performance, lead-time drift, and price movement continuously against a company's own approval workflows and risk thresholds - not a generic vendor scorecard built for a different business's risk tolerance. When a supplier trends toward a threshold that's actually been defined as meaningful, procurement gets a flag with the specific data and reasoning behind it, while there's still time to act.
Nothing here auto-escalates or auto-cancels a supplier relationship. It surfaces the pattern early enough for a person to decide what to do about it - a phone call, a second source lined up, a renegotiation - while there's still room to choose.
No manufacturer has run this workflow yet - the scenario above is illustrative, not a customer story. It's fully designed, and it's exactly the shape of workflow we'd scope as a pilot: one supplier segment, with a company's own risk thresholds backtested against historical supplier performance before any alert is trusted.
If you're finding out about supplier problems after they've already cost you something, this is the kind of first workflow we'd build with you.
If you're finding out about supplier problems after they've already cost you something, this is exactly the kind of first workflow we'd scope with you as a pilot.
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