Free Download

The Coordination Tax: Why Supply Chain Communication Is Procurement's Most Expensive Unsolved Problem

The ERP is where direct spend data lives, but the work usually happens somewhere else.

Supplier updates, quote negotiations, production confirmations, and shipping exceptions tend to live outside any formal system, tracked manually by whoever has the time and the context to keep up.

This gap between the ERP as a system of record and the inbox as a system of reality is nothing new. What is new is that AI has matured to the point where it can operate in the unstructured, conversational layer where most of the real supply chain work happens. This offers considerable opportunity for procurement to address problems that have historically been too expensive and too complex to solve.

This briefing, drawn from a conversation with Nick Gospodinov, Founder and CEO of Mandel AI, explores what that opportunity looks like in practice and what procurement leaders in manufacturing and distribution should be thinking about as they navigate it.

Download this briefing to learn about:

• The accumulated cost of getting information from one place to another

• Why structured workflows seem to escape the boundaries of the ERP so easily

• How to know if trust is your real barrier to system and process adoption