A supplier offers 200 housings for October 8 and the remaining 400 for October 14. Your PO asks for all 600 on October 10. Someone has to check whether the split works for production, settle the delivery plan with the supplier and update the order. Until that happens, the buyer still has work to do and planning cannot rely on the dates.
Mandel takes on that follow-through. It chases missing replies, checks what the supplier has agreed, brings the buyer any decision that needs approval, and writes the confirmed result back to the ERP. That is part of the broader sourcing and ordering work it runs, from RFQ through invoice. The connections and permitted updates are agreed for your setup before rollout.
Use the ERP workflow mapping workbook (Excel) to record field ownership and run acceptance checks with procurement and your systems owner. This guide covers SAP S/4HANA, Oracle NetSuite and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management. Start by checking what your edition and enabled features already handle. Then use the workbook to identify the steps still falling to your team and specify what you want automated.
Start with the work your ERP already does
Ask a buyer and a systems owner to demonstrate an ordinary order together. Follow its creation, approval, transmission, supplier response, amendment and receipt. Look at both the formal process and the work people actually perform when the response arrives outside it.
Mark the steps your ERP completes and the steps a person handles. A buyer may copy a date from a PDF, ask whether it means dispatch or arrival, call planning, chase the supplier again and finally change the PO. That list tells you what a new product would need to take over. If an existing feature can already do the job, check whether enabling it solves the problem.
Use a small, varied sample. Include an unchanged confirmation, a partial reply, a date change, a split delivery and an unanswered order. Include suppliers who use your portal or EDI connection and those who reply by email. The process needs to work for the mix your buyers actually handle.
Record the ERP edition, release and features your team uses, along with the sites, supplier channels and extensions involved in the job. Check each setup separately if your sites use different systems or purchasing processes.
SAP: understand the confirmation setup
SAP documents supplier confirmations as part of purchasing, including confirmation control and categories that can be relevant to material requirements planning. Its guidance also describes an acknowledgement requirement that supports reminders for outstanding acknowledgements. Check how these features are used in your purchasing process before adding another reminder or confirmation workflow. SAP confirmation documentation.
Have the systems owner show the configured process for your order type and supplier. Where is the response captured? Which confirmation information affects planning? What happens when a response covers only part of a line? Does the supplier already communicate through SAP Business Network, EDI or another established connection?
Next, follow the steps that still need a buyer. A supplier might explain a conditional date in a PDF, refer to two POs in one email, or omit the balance of a delivery. Check who asks the follow-up question, matches the answer to the right order and records the accepted plan in SAP. Keep your existing structured exchange where it handles this successfully.
Avoid using a generic “delivery date” label in the mapping exercise. Ask which record holds the requirement, which represents the supplier's commitment, and which drives the planning decision in this configuration. Have the systems owner show each field on one of your orders.
NetSuite: distinguish order and shipment information
NetSuite's purchasing documentation describes an expected receipt date on a purchase order line. Its inbound-shipment documentation also shows how quantities and expected delivery dates on shipment records can participate in supply allocation. A PO and an inbound shipment can therefore describe different parts of the supply picture. Entering a purchase order, inbound shipment example.
For your workflow, identify the record that should change when a supplier revises a promise. If 200 units are on an inbound shipment and 400 remain unshipped, one date on the whole PO may be an inadequate description. Check what your enabled features and current process use for each quantity and location.
Keep the vendor, subsidiary where applicable, item, line and location attached to the supplier reply. The same part may be on several orders or headed to different sites. Ask the buyer to show an example where an item appears on several open orders, then demonstrate how the correct line is selected.
Check what happens after a supplier reports that the goods have arrived. The receiving team still confirms the receipt, and quality may need to release the material before production can use it. The automation should retain those distinctions. Ask the buyer to show what is still outstanding after each update: a missing shipment reference, a short delivery or a certificate that has yet to arrive.
Dynamics 365: evaluate the enabled collaboration and agent capabilities
Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management supports vendor collaboration in which suppliers can accept, reject or propose changes to orders. Microsoft's documentation describes line changes, split schedules, notes and confirmation states. Include these features when reviewing what your current setup can do. Vendor collaboration documentation.
As reviewed in September 2026, Microsoft also documents a Procurement Agent as a production-ready preview. The described capabilities include supplier email handling, follow-up communication and impact analysis. Availability, prerequisites and preview terms should be checked for your environment. Compare its supported workflows with the work your buying team needs completed. Procurement Agent overview.
Test those capabilities on your own orders. Examine a changed date, a condition contained in a note and an incomplete response. Identify what is handled by the configured workflow, what still needs a buyer, and whether work spanning another system remains outside that process.
For both Dynamics and an external product, follow the same order from the supplier reply to the final update. Check that the right line changed, any required approval was obtained, and the supplier confirmed the accepted plan. Record how much chasing, checking and retyping the buyer still had to do.
Give each field a clear meaning and owner
For each field you plan to update, record what it means, where the value comes from, where it belongs and who can change it. Keep the supporting supplier reply or approved decision with the change. You only need to map the fields used in the first workflow.
For confirmation work, the map will usually need to distinguish:
- The buyer's requested quantity and required date.
- The supplier's proposed quantity, date and any condition attached to them.
- The quantities and dates accepted by your team and confirmed by the supplier.
- Shipment and receipt facts as they become available.
- The order, line, schedule, revision and business entity those facts belong to.
Suppose the supplier proposes October 14 and planning rejects it. That date must remain a proposal while the team works on an alternative. Similarly, if the buyer requests October 12, the supplier still needs to confirm it. Keep the requested, proposed and accepted dates distinct in the records your team uses.
The purchase order date guide explains the difference between requested, promised, dispatched and received dates. Have your systems owner identify the field for each date. If the current setup cannot store a split or a proposed change separately, agree where the buyer will find that information before automating updates.
Walk one supplier change through to the final record
Return to the example order for 600 housings required on October 10. The supplier replies that 200 can arrive on October 8 and 400 on October 14. Planning needs only 200 for the first build, but the later balance still needs an explicit decision.
In a Mandel workflow, Mandel asks whether those dates mean arrival at your site or dispatch, and checks the split against the ordered quantity and any earlier shipment. It brings the buyer the proposed plan with the production requirement and supplier reply attached. Planning decides whether October 14 works for the balance. After approval, Mandel confirms the plan with the supplier and updates the agreed ERP fields.
Illustrative supplier confirmation
One order, two accepted delivery dates.
200 housings on October 8 and 400 on October 14, both arrival dates.
Planning accepts October 14 for the balance.
Both accepted quantities and dates are recorded with the supplier confirmation.
If the balance is not accepted or the record update fails, that work remains open.
At the end, the buyer should be able to see both accepted quantities and dates, who approved the change and the supplier's confirmation. If planning accepts only the first 200, Mandel still has to work on the remaining 400. If the ERP update fails, that update remains outstanding.
Run the example with your own order records during evaluation. Follow it past the initial alert and the approval: check the supplier confirmation and open the updated order in the ERP. Those final steps are where the buyer should get the work back off their desk.
Avoid duplicate reminders and conflicting updates
Two systems sending reminders about the same order can create confusion even when each message is individually reasonable. Assign one owner for each outbound step and define how the other participants see that the work is already being handled.
The same applies to record changes. A planner may update a requirement while a supplier response is under review. The result must reflect the current decision, not silently restore an earlier value. Ask to see how the workflow handles a superseded order, a repeated message and a buyer intervention.
Keep an existing portal or EDI process where it works. Define what happens when a supplier switches channels or contradicts a structured response in a later email. The person taking over needs the supplier messages, decisions already made and the question still awaiting an answer.
Use the approval matrix guide to set which actions can run automatically and which need approval. Permission to request a revised date does not grant permission to accept a substitute, increase spend or change payment details.
Agree acceptance checks before connecting live work
Write expected results for a few ordinary and difficult cases. Include a clean confirmation, an incomplete line, an old revision arriving late, a split shipment, a price-basis difference and an update that cannot be completed. Your sample should reflect actual supplier formats and conventions.
For each example, check which order and line were selected, what action was taken and whether approval was required. Open the resulting record with the systems owner and compare it with the agreed result.
In a historical review, check the proposed action against the order and messages available at that point. Supplier responses to new requests have to be tested during live work. For the live test, agree which orders are included, who approves changes and what the product can update. The evaluation guide explains what to check in each review.
In the workbook, use one mapping row per field in a defined workflow, and one acceptance row per test. For a passing result, attach the supporting record and name the person who checked it. Assign failures and unanswered questions to someone who can resolve them.
Where Mandel fits
You can enable an existing feature, ask your ERP partner to extend the system or add a product that handles the remaining steps. Compare the setup effort, ongoing support, what suppliers need to do and the work left with buyers.
Mandel is for the supplier work that keeps landing back on the buying team: chasing a missing quote, resolving a delivery change, getting an invoice corrected or pursuing a credit. It works within your playbooks and approval rules, using your supplier instructions. Your buyer makes the supplier choice; Mandel carries the approved work through and keeps the records current.
Bring a few orders your buyers know well, including one that took several follow-ups to settle. We can review the supplier messages and order history together, show what Mandel could have done, and agree which work to start with. The rollout guide covers what your team needs to prepare.
