Chasing a late supplier: what actually gets an answer

Two situations, and they are not the same job

When a supplier is slow, the first question is not what to say. It is whether the two of you ever agreed what “on time” looks like. Almost every buyer is in one of two positions.

A. There is an agreed dispatch schedule

You and the supplier know what is expected and when. So the follow-up is simple: you ask a day before the committed dispatch date. The reminder is already in a calendar or in the system, so it does not depend on anyone remembering. And when production or sales asks where their material is, you do not have to guess. You tell them the dispatch or arrival date agreed with the supplier, and that is the end of the conversation.

B. There is no schedule

This one is messy. The commitments are vague, the follow-ups are not planned, and they usually happen for one of two reasons: it came up in a meeting, or somebody in production or sales rang to ask for the material. Because nothing was agreed, nobody can say whether the order is late or on time. You are chasing a date that does not exist.

Why so many buyers end up in B

It is usually not carelessness. It is how the purchase order is built. A purchase order created in SAP or most other standard ERPs carries one delivery date per line item. That is fine when the whole quantity arrives at once. It breaks down the moment it does not.

Say you order 100,000 pieces of an item, and the supplier ships a container every week, with at most 25,000 pieces fitting in each. That is four weekly dispatches. The order line has room for exactly one date.

You can work around it by raising one line per container. It works, but it goes against good practice and it clutters your records for very little benefit. So most teams do not, and the real schedule ends up in somebody’s head, an email thread or a private spreadsheet. Then the buyer is in situation B again, by default.

Chase the day before, not the day after

With a schedule in place, the best moment to follow up is the day before the committed dispatch. It is early enough to fix a problem and late enough that the supplier cannot say it was too soon to know. Chase after the date and you are already negotiating a delay.

Who to contact, and how

• Start with the sales contact. That is who normally owns the relationship. The right person does depend on the company, how urgent the material is, and whether this is routine follow-up or things have already gone wrong.
• Escalate manager to manager. When the sales contact cannot move things, your manager speaks to theirs, or higher.
• Call first, then put it in writing. A call or a WhatsApp message gets the real answer fastest, and for anything time-sensitive that is where it starts. Then send an email so that what was said is on the record. The call gets the answer. The email makes it official.

What to ask for, and what not to say

Do not give any relief, such as extra time, a partial shipment you did not plan for, or an agreement to wait, before you understand what is really happening. Offering a way out too early makes the real situation harder to find.

Then ask for evidence, not reassurance:

• Shipping documents. This is the real proof that something has been dispatched. “It left yesterday” is a sentence. A bill of lading or a delivery note is a fact.
• Photos with your markings, and the material test certificate (MTC). When you want to know whether the goods are actually being made, ask for photos of the product with your own markings on it, together with the MTC. For us that has been enough to tell whether production has really started.

Warning signs that a date is not real

• The supplier goes quiet. Silence is almost always a warning, and it is rarely good news.
• Nobody on your side is in touch. If the procurement team is not following up, the supplier notices. A date nobody asks about stops feeling like a commitment. This warning sign sits on your side of the table.
• The market is short of that product. When the item is scarce, suppliers serve some customers first. If you buy on credit, you are probably not first in the queue, because the buyer paying cash is.

When chasing does not work

The procurement manager steps in. The most effective way is to set up a meeting rather than keep exchanging messages. In that meeting:

1. Get the supplier to explain the real cause of the delay, in their own words.
2. Explain the consequences to your business, including any liquidated damages (LD) in the contract. LDs are an amount agreed in advance for late delivery.
3. Agree revised delivery commitments, with dates and quantities, and write them down.

The last step matters most. A meeting without new, agreed dates ends with everyone feeling better and nothing to enforce. Once the revised schedule exists, you are back in situation A and can follow it up the day before each dispatch.

If the late-delivery clause comes into play, the paper trail is what makes it usable. For the cost side of a delay, see demurrage and detention, and for how to judge a supplier over time, see measuring delivery.

A short checklist

• Is there an agreed schedule, with quantities and dates for each dispatch?
• Is the follow-up already scheduled for the day before?
• Call or message first, email after.
• Ask for documents or photos with MTC, not promises.
• Give no relief until you understand the situation.
• Escalate with a meeting, and leave it with new dates.

In the software

This is the situation Procurement Control Tower was built around. A schedule reference sits against the purchase order and carries a committed dispatch date and quantity, so an order gets a dispatch schedule instead of one date per line, and partial shipments are recorded against it. If a supplier moves a date, the revision keeps the original commitment. The Follow-ups queue shows each open order with what was promised and when to ask again, sorted by what is overdue, and what the supplier said is saved with the date and who logged it. See how it works, or follow one order through it in the worked example.