Suppliers confirm ship dates when confirmation is part of the deal, not a favor you ask for. Write a confirm-by deadline into your PO terms, ask for a ship date on every line, make replying take one click or one line, require reconfirmation whenever the order changes, and score each supplier on acknowledgment and on-time delivery, then show them the score.
Morsa publishes this guide and appears in it. Every vendor fact was read on the vendor’s own site on 12 October 2026.
Why don’t suppliers confirm ship dates?
Mostly because nobody made it a requirement. In some buying systems, acknowledgment is optional unless the buyer asks for it. Coupa’s own supplier FAQ says of the PO acknowledgment field: “Some Coupa customers like their suppliers to use that field. Ask them if they want you to use it.” If the buyer never turns the requirement on, a supplier who skips it has broken no rule.
The second reason is that buyers ask for the wrong date. A PO usually carries a requested receipt date, the day you want the goods on your dock. The supplier controls the ship date. Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 documentation draws the line: “If any of your vendors don’t have specific delivery terms (such as delivery duty paid, delivery at place, or delivery at place unloaded), you must tell them when they should ship.” A supplier who confirms “your requested date” may be confirming a day it never planned to ship against.
The third reason is effort: if confirming means a login and a form per line, a busy supplier will answer the phone call instead.
What should your PO terms say?
Put these in the standard terms printed on, or linked from, every PO, and in each supplier agreement:
A confirm-by deadline. Acknowledge each PO within a set number of business days. AT&S tells suppliers in a training guide hosted on SAP’s support site that it “needs an Order confirmation within three working days after receipt of the purchase order.”
A ship date per line, not only a delivery date. Ask for both, at line level, so partial and split shipments are visible.
Accept, change or reject, explicitly. The supplier either accepts the line as issued or proposes a new date, quantity or price, with a reason.
Reconfirm on change. Any change by either side reopens confirmation.
Notice of slips. The supplier tells you as soon as a confirmed date will move, within a set time of knowing.
A realistic request date. NAED’s best-practice guide for electrical distributors and manufacturers says the default request date “should be an accurate estimate of historical lead time rather than ASAP, today’s date, or tomorrow.” Suppliers ignore dates they know are fiction.
How do you make confirming easy for suppliers?
Meet them where they already work, and keep the answer to one action. Both big supplier networks are free for suppliers: SAP Business Network’s standard account lists “Document collaboration on orders, invoices, order confirmations, ship notices, order change requests” at “Price: Free,” and Coupa says its portal “is completely free for suppliers.” In SAP’s one-time password setup, interactive email orders let suppliers “confirm and invoice purchase orders, without having to register,” though SAP says that setup “isn’t available for new customers.” For suppliers with many lines, Coupa’s CSV loader takes a “Promise Date” column, “The delivery date you are committing to for the goods.”
For suppliers who will never use a portal, an email with one structured question works: PO, line, quantity, need date, and “reply CONFIRM with your ship date.” Leverage AI builds its product on this, embedding POs “right in their inboxes,” and SourceDay offers “’No login’, interactive emails.” The test is simple: can a supplier’s customer service rep confirm a line from a phone in under a minute?
How should your system enforce confirmation?
Turn on the rules your ERP or network already has. In SAP Business Network, buyers can enable “Require delivery dates for order confirmations and ship notices.” In Coupa, buyers can make the promised date a confirmable field, and “If the dates differ, the system triggers a reconfirmation to ensure the buyer and supplier remain aligned on the delivery schedule.” In Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, the “Supplier requested and confirmed shipment dates” feature (version 10.0.40 or later) calculates a requested ship date per line from the requested receipt date, lead time, transport days and the vendor ship calendar.
Then make the confirmed date the one planning uses. SourceDay’s advice: decide “which field represents current supplier reality,” because “Without clear ownership, multiple versions of the truth emerge.”
How do you measure suppliers on it?
Score what you asked for, and share it. NAED defines on-time delivery as “The number of lines received complete from the manufacturer by the requested date based on normal/historical lead times or a negotiated delivery date divided by the total lines ordered,” and tells distributors to “Advise your channel partner if their on-time delivery is adequate, if it needs improvement, or if it is unacceptable.”
Metric | How to count it | What it tells the supplier |
|---|---|---|
Acknowledgment rate | PO lines confirmed within the deadline, divided by lines issued | Whether they follow your terms |
Time to acknowledge | Business days from PO sent to confirmation | How fast you get a commitment |
Confirmed-date accuracy | Lines received by the confirmed ship date plus transit, divided by lines received | Whether their dates mean anything |
On-time delivery (NAED definition) | Lines received complete by the requested date, divided by lines ordered | How they perform against your need |
Date changes per line | Supplier-initiated date changes, divided by open lines | How often their commitments move |
SourceDay reports that Prairie Machine improved supplier PO acknowledgment by 41% and on-time delivery by 11% “in the first year alone” using SourceDay.
What can software automate?
The reminders, the reading of replies and the scorecard math, on every open line, every day. What software cannot do is write your terms or decide what happens to a supplier who ignores them; that stays with purchasing. SourceDay, Coupa and SAP collect confirmations through a portal and email; Leverage AI through email and document parsing; Microsoft’s Procurement Agent drafts follow-ups inside Dynamics 365; Didero and Morsa run agents on top of your systems, and Morsa also reads confirmations that arrive in chat or by phone. Compared on price, ERPs and go-live in the best PO expediting software for 2026; the trigger and reply mechanics are in how to automate supplier follow-up on open purchase orders.
What does a captured confirmation look like?
At J4S, a 120-person glass manufacturing plant, a material warning at Mon 21:10 became work for the purchasing head, due Tue 12:00, after Morsa found 3 open orders on Line 2 that depended on it. After a nudge at Tue 10:00 and an escalation at Tue 13:00 with 1,200 pieces of Friday dispatch at risk, the supplier’s answer arrived at Tue 15:20: delivery Wednesday. That confirmation did not stay in a chat. Morsa moved the due date and recorded who moved it and why, and the goods receipt at Wed 11:40 closed the item. Times are illustrative per the J4S story; this is manufacturing proof. Over its first four weeks, J4S went from about 30% to about 75% of roughly 900 commitments done on time.
Where does Morsa fit, and when is it the wrong choice?
Morsa fits when supplier confirmations arrive everywhere: email, Outlook, Gmail, Teams, WhatsApp, a phone call or any other channel the team runs on. It reads the reply in whatever channel it comes, matches it to the open order, updates the date within your rules, flags what the new date breaks, and holds the line open until the goods receipt. Sunil K Verma, Plant Head at J4S: “I used to spend the first hour of every morning reconstructing yesterday. Now the chasing happens in the WhatsApp groups my supervisors already use, whether or not I remember.”
Morsa is the wrong choice if you want every supplier confirming in one portal with built-in scorecards (SourceDay, Coupa or SAP), or a full procure-to-pay suite. Morsa does have a supplier portal, but a light one: suppliers get a link to a form for the confirmation and answer without a login, and Morsa also takes answers in whatever channel the supplier already uses. It is built and proven in manufacturing, now onboarding its first distributors. Book a demo: https://cal.com/morsa
Sources
Coupa, Orders FAQ, Purchase Order Collaboration with Buyers, Promised Date as a Confirmable Field in Orders and Confirm Order Confirmations with CSV Files; Supply Chain Collaboration, read 12 October 2026, docs.coupa.com, coupa.com
Microsoft Learn, Calculate requested ship dates for purchase orders, read 12 October 2026, learn.microsoft.com
AT&S, Purchase Order Collaboration Supplier Training Guide, hosted on SAP Ariba support, read 12 October 2026, support.ariba.com
SAP, SAP Business Network Supplier Account Pricing, Enabling Suppliers on SAP Business Network and support note KB0405418, read 12 October 2026, sap.com, help.sap.com, support.ariba.com
National Association of Electrical Distributors, Recommended Best Practices: Supply Chain Scorecard: Performance Measures (2012), read 12 October 2026, PDF
SourceDay, How to Improve Promise Date Accuracy in ERP (17 June 2026), Supplier Portal and homepage, read 12 October 2026, sourceday.com/blog, sourceday.com/supplier-portal
Leverage AI, Purchase Order Automation, read 12 October 2026, tryleverage.ai
Morsa, J4S customer story, read 12 October 2026, /customers/j4s
Changelog
12 October 2026: first published.
