This morning I received another email inviting me to register for a supplier portal.
Apparently this would:
- prevent document misplacement,
- encourage timely payment,
- improve visibility into invoice status.
I read it twice.
Then I found myself asking a simple question.
If your goal is to send me a purchase order…
…why aren’t you simply sending me the purchase order?
The email proudly explained that everything was now handled electronically.
I smiled.
Because email is electronic.
PDFs are electronic.
The internet has been moving documents around the world perfectly well for decades.
The problem wasn’t that they wanted to work electronically.
The problem was that they’d confused “electronic” with “portal.”
They’re not the same thing.
Like many suppliers, I now have accounts on countless customer portals.
Every one of them has another password.
Another login screen.
Another notification email.
Another browser bookmark.
Another password reset because I only visit the site every six months.
Nobody reduced work.
The work simply moved.
What fascinated me most was one sentence.
“…to prevent document misplacement.”
That’s a perfectly reasonable goal.
So why not attach the purchase order as a PDF?
If I receive it by email, it goes into our document management system automatically.
It’s indexed.
Backed up.
Searchable.
Linked to the customer.
Exactly as every other purchase order has been for years.
Instead, somebody decided the answer wasn’t better document handling.
It was another portal.
I’ve started noticing this pattern everywhere.
We identify a genuine problem.
Then solve something adjacent to it.
The original problem remains.
A new one appears.
The goal wasn’t to build a supplier portal.
The goal was to issue a purchase order.
Those are two very different things.
Somewhere along the way the implementation became more important than the interaction.
This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently while building Vork.
Software should express behaviours.
Not dictate processes.
“Issue a purchase order.”
That’s the behaviour.
Whether it arrives by email, through an API, or by some future protocol isn’t really the interesting part.
The behaviour is.
Everything else is implementation detail.
One sentence in the email caught my attention.
“Not registering in a timely manner may impact your ability to do business with us.”
That struck me as strangely backwards.
If your purchasing process depends on every supplier creating yet another account, remembering yet another password and learning yet another interface…
perhaps the supplier isn’t the bottleneck.
Perhaps the process is.
Good software removes work.
Bad software redistributes it.
Great software removes work for everyone involved.
That’s a much harder problem.
It’s also the only one worth solving.
I have a confession.
My reply was considerably shorter than this essay.
It simply said:
We operate a “No PDF, No Invoice” policy.
Please send me the purchase order as a PDF attachment.
It’s an elegant solution that’s been around for years.
And it works.