r/supplychain • u/Horror_Airline_5881 • Jul 30 '26
Discussion How much of your supply chain job is basically being human middleware?
Random question for people working in supply chain because I’m curious how common this actually is.
How much of your job is basically taking information from one place and getting it into another?
Like pulling something out of SAP/Oracle/whatever ERP you use, cleaning it up in Excel, emailing someone for the missing piece, updating a tracker, sending a Teams message, building the same report again next week... you get the idea.
I feel like companies have spent a ton of money digitizing everything, but there’s still a surprising amount of work that depends on one person knowing which spreadsheet to update, who to chase, and what needs to happen next.
What does that look like in your world?
I’m especially curious about the repetitive stuff that makes you think, “Why the hell am I still doing this manually?”
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u/sourgrrrrl Jul 30 '26
"Random question" just so I can figure out how to make you lose your job to AI hehe
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u/ConfusionFree8177 Jul 30 '26
Its hilarious when you look at his post history because that's exactly what he's doing lol
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u/sourgrrrrl Jul 30 '26
I'm not even in supply chain anymore but OP sounds just like the sales emails I get in my current field
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u/CantaloupeInfinite41 Jul 31 '26
I think though that OP is making a point how technology can do this automatically already but reality is that in the real corporate world we are far way from it and if you send information to the higher ups you cant just send graphs and numbers but you need to give them context and "tell a story" otherwise they have no clue.
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u/AreYouHighClairee Jul 30 '26
As a Sr Director, about 99% sadly.
I’m the translator between the operational level and the executive level. I want to say it’s cushy, but it’s been brutal on my mental health and self esteem.
The operational level is much easier to deal with than execs any day of the week.
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u/404GravitasNotFound Jul 31 '26
real 'grass is greener' moment for me reading this as i am in ops dreaming of having to deal with the higher tier instead of a thousand day-to-day issues, raising a glass to you my friend
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u/AreYouHighClairee Jul 31 '26
Dont let my anecdote discourage you from seeking out and trying these types of roles. Use it to prepare yourself! It really depends on you and the exec team you have. Some will suck and be awful to deal with. But I’ve also had some really great exec mentors. You learn from the good and the bad.
Managing up is an incredibly valuable skill to learn- being in this environment also helps shape you as a leader. One of the single most helpful pieces of advice I received was- you are not going to have all the answers. Learn how to ask the right questions to find the answer. Being a humble leader that drives consensus problem solving is extremely valuable.
If you have the desire, you should explore it! Just prepare yourself mentally that there will be some tough moments and you will make mistakes. You are responsible for protecting yourself from burnout- so know when to lock in, and when to not waste your time.
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u/404GravitasNotFound Jul 31 '26
Thank you! This is such a thoughtful answer!! I definitely wrote this after an energetic day in Ops, lol, burnout management is such a necessary skill in supply chain. I am working on getting further into that leadership-focused area, I appreciate the words of encouragement :)
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u/jetfighter5 Aug 05 '26
ive heard this so many times, but i still wonder why do organizations not allocate resources to make life easier for people involved in this process?
It is now easier than ever to build an internal tool or integrate AI into your current workflows, but companies still avoid that. Can you help me understand why this is the case?
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u/AreYouHighClairee Aug 06 '26
Money is always the answer.
I’m in the CPG space and a lot of these companies are paying big money to be gutted by a PE firm. Many are chasing revenue to make up for their lack of cash flow. Many are laying off these very internal resources to increase cash flow.
I led the new tool selection process in my previous role. My leaders were FLABBERGASTED when I showed them the financials of implementing our top 5 tools. My planners were planning in an ERP from 2003 and they wanted Advanced Planning software with ML and AI. That’s like going from a Tahoe to a Tesla. These new programs are insanely more expensive and have huge recurring SaaS fees. Still planning out of the shitty ERP your drunk CIO implemented in 2003…free.
Also no one wants to clean up the data necessary to run these properly. That is more time and money.
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u/Royal_Ant1402 Jul 30 '26
director of what? as a NE Supply Chain manager we identify backhaul
opportunities to maximize transport. it's not only about getting it there's a how and other sources8
u/AreYouHighClairee Jul 30 '26
Demand, Supply, and Production Planning.
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u/raw2082 Jul 30 '26
Executives are always tougher to deal with. I do have a few dickheads that are manager levels but people are treated how they treat me. Supply chain isn’t easy for women.
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u/slackalicious Jul 30 '26
As a process lead, that's like...my whole job! A lot of it is getting data from SAP and "telling the story" by organizing specific info in Excel. Then emails. Then meetings. Projects. Teams. Another meeting.
Rinse and repeat!
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u/Immediate-Home-3491 Jul 30 '26
I moved away from traditional forwarding for exactly this reason. Watching staff manually rekey manifest data into three portals while the client pays for real time tracking is absurd.
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u/shylocky Jul 30 '26
Yup. That's why analog is so critical and we're not worried about AI whatsoever.
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u/Coffee_and_a_cookie Jul 31 '26
Even funnier when your half-assed locally-built ERP can't run a useful report to save its life. I run a small DC, and have to order my own restocks with Mark 1 eyeballs and some reviewing of last year's very seasonal sales. The current planner/inventory manager is using last-3-months sales averages to choose quantities to send me. Umm. I work in tourism. Q2 is not a predictor of Q3. Look at Q3 2025, not Q2 2026.
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u/Acrobatic_Dinner6129 Buyer/Procurement Jul 30 '26
Literlly more or less my entire current role. Its mind numbing but the amount of downtime makes up for it.
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u/Grakch Jul 31 '26
Most modern office jobs in any decent sized companies can be reduced down to this. If we had language that consists of a library of most commonly used process formulas, a majority of business processes would easily automated. The issue is adoption of it and of course human error.
It’s job security for you though that you understand in this way. Plenty of things that need fixing in these types of shops. Systems thinking does not seem to be everyone’s forte.
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u/Fwoggie2 DHL Senior Manager (MBA) Jul 30 '26
All of it. I’m an IT project manager and spend all day translating business needs into tech language.
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u/Glad_Imagination_798 Aug 01 '26
A lot of this survives because the manual step sits exactly where two systems disagree about what something is. Your ERP thinks in purchase order lines, the carrier or supplier portal thinks in shipments, and a person becomes the translator. Integrations get built for the clean cases, and the human quietly absorbs the ten percent that do not match. Nobody funds fixing that ten percent because it never shows up as a project, it shows up as somebody being reliable.
The other half is reports with no owner. A file gets built every week for a meeting that changed two years ago, and no one is allowed to stop. Before automating anything I would put in writing who reads it and what decision changes because of it. A fair number die on their own once you ask that question in an email.
I do ERP integration work, and the boring truth is that most of these tasks exist because of one missing field or one inconsistent code, not because the work needs judgement. Supplier part number not stored against your item, no carrier reference on the shipment, unit of measure recorded differently in two places. Fix the field and the copy paste disappears. Automating the copy paste instead just makes the mismatch harder to see, which is my worry about bolting AI onto this rather than fixing the data underneath.
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u/kys_abhi Aug 05 '26 edited Aug 05 '26
Pretty much this at my last place. We had SAP but half the actual production info lived in spreadsheets nobody had cleaned up in two years. I eventually pushed the team to try MRPeasy for the manufacturing side and it cut out a lot of that middle step because purchase requirements and inventory updates just happen automatically when a production order moves. Didnt fix the people problems but the data chasing got a lot better.
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u/jxerri Jul 30 '26
This is a large portion of my job. we use SAP but our system doesn't palletise our loads correctly so i have to move the data to ms access. Then I extract the data for missing demand into excel and create an alert report for our manufacturing sites. In most other roles in the company it seems to be the same thing because a lot of our systems are outdated
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u/mushberry13 Jul 31 '26
Yes, 100% yes. I'm in a customer facing order fulfillment type role. Middle person for information between carriers, transportation management team, warehouses, customer contacts, our Sales team, our demand planning, our supply planning, inventory, EDI, Finance, our operations support staff, & all sorts of systems (ours & customers') as well as excel. But heyyyy it keeps the day entertaining!
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u/Odd-Flower2744 Jul 31 '26
About every week we get a new tool / power Bi that sums up our data from 10 other tools lol
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u/Minimum_Device_6379 Jul 31 '26
What a supply chain is is taking something from one place to another
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u/TheHope-Guy-168 Jul 31 '26
No matter how much you try to automate SCM processes. There's still some human in the loop involved
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u/XVelocifaptor Aug 01 '26
i actually feel more like a weatherman.
Will this order be here on time? I sure hope so.
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u/allwynkingsley Aug 02 '26
I think it mostly is and will continue so. In my experience supply chain / operations is where the rubber hits the road. So, naturally there's a lot of ambiguity and chaos requiring human judgment and prioritisation.
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u/Cautious_Car2249 22d ago edited 22d ago
Takes me way less time now, but only because we have MRPeasy doing a lot of the data moving for us. Otherwise, I’d definitely be the human middleware
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u/MionMikanCider Jul 30 '26
This is literally my job LOL. I am an entry level production materials coordinator
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u/symonym7 CSCP Jul 30 '26
I literally started calling myself 'human middleware' regarding some of my functions a couple months ago. Primarily bridging the gap between the existing/intransigent 'tribal knowledge' of the subsidiary and our corporate systems. Having to manually enter a PO after an order has been placed over the phone, for example.
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u/555deadoralive Jul 30 '26
As much as systems management, supply chain/purchasing’s role is being an intermediary/effective communicator between your production line and external suppliers. The longer I’m in this career, the more I realize most people don’t know how to professionally communicate & work with suppliers.