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A supplier promises to deliver parts on the 18th of the month. The shipment gets pushed to the 25th. The enterprise resource planning (ERP) system updates the expected delivery date, and when the goods finally arrive, the supplier is recorded as having delivered on time.

“Finance will see something, procurement will see something, and production will see something else,” Axya Founder and CEO Félix Bélisle-Dockrill said in a discussion hosted by PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster.

For chief financial officers, the consequences extend beyond purchasing efficiency. Inaccurate delivery records can distort supplier evaluations, obscure contractual obligations, complicate invoice reconciliation and weaken the information used to make working capital decisions.

“Releasing payment if something is perceived as on time, but it’s seven days late, there may be contractual consequences,” Webster said, connecting the issue directly to payment controls.

As a result, large enterprises may be managing supplier performance using data that systematically obscures the very disruptions they need to prevent.

The larger opportunity is not just automating procurement but creating a more reliable record of what suppliers actually commit to delivering, Bélisle-Dockrill said. Axya raised $17 million Canadian dollars (about $12.1 million) in September to do just that.

Enterprise procurement remains dependent on emails, PDFs, spreadsheets and disconnected software systems. Human employees typically manually bridge these information silos.

“The buyers are the human routers between all these different stakeholders,” Bélisle-Dockrill said, adding that these “human routers” frequently manually transfer supplier confirmations and changes into internal systems, and those changes do not always reach finance.

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