"The LineNow team is extremely pro-active about your success with PO and inventory-aware ordering. We researched many PO and inventory apps that are available, most of them are 'cookie cutter' type apps that force you to be limited on what features you will have access to. Not this one. You will not be disappointed!"
— Ralph W., Whitmans
Whitmans is a multi-location retailer that orders across a large catalog from many suppliers. Before LineNow, the average purchase order took about 8 rounds of back-and-forth with the supplier — confirmations, price corrections, stock questions, substitutions, ETAs. Today, a back-and-forth happens roughly once every 8 purchase orders.
These are Whitmans' reported descriptions of its before-and-after workflow. “Rounds per PO” and “POs needing back-and-forth” are different measures unless the same definition of a round was used. The report indicates a substantial reduction in manual follow-up; it does not establish a universal productivity benchmark.
What 8 rounds per PO actually costs
The rounds themselves were never the whole cost. Each exchange meant:
- A buyer reading the reply, working out what it changes — price, quantity, timing — and retyping the consequence into notes or a spreadsheet
- The purchase order going stale between rounds, so nobody could trust the document itself; the email thread became the real system of record
- Receiving and accounting inheriting whatever the thread said last, whether or not anyone transcribed it correctly
Multiply 8 rounds by every PO, every supplier, every location, every week, and the ordering workflow spends most of its time on conversation management instead of buying.
What changed
The back-and-forth collapsed from both ends: