How Nina Gave an Operations Team Back 15 Hours a Week: An Order Visibility Case Study

Every operations team has someone whose unofficial job is hunting for order status. They start the morning checking inboxes, then carrier portals, then calling the freight forwarder, then emailing the supplier again. By the time they have a clear picture of what's in transit, half the day is gone.

This is purchase order visibility automation done the hard way. And it's more common than most teams want to admit.

The Problem: Order Data Lives Everywhere Except Where You Need It

Open POs don’t sit still. A supplier confirms the order, then changes the ship date. A booking gets made but never linked back to the original PO. A container departs and no one updates the spreadsheet. By the time an exception surfaces, a late delivery, a missing confirmation, a shipment that went quiet, your team is already behind.

Industry research consistently shows that roughly half of all PO lines are modified after issuance. Quantities change, dates shift, line items get split. Each change generates a new email, a new portal update, or a new phone call. None of it flows automatically into your ERP.

So someone stitches it together by hand. Every day.

For one mid-size distribution team, that manual stitching consumed 15 hours a week. Three people, five hours each, checking portals, parsing supplier emails, and updating a shared tracker so everyone else could answer a simple question: where is our stuff?

Why Portals Don't Solve This

Supplier portals were supposed to fix the visibility problem. In practice, they created a new one.

Each supplier uses a different portal. Each carrier has its own tracking interface. Your freight forwarder sends status updates in a format that doesn’t match your ERP fields. Your team ends up logging into four or five systems to build a picture that should exist in one place.

The problem isn't a lack of data. It's that the data is fragmented across systems that don't talk to each other, and someone has to manually connect the dots.

That’s the gap Nina was built to close.

Introducing Nina: Nauta's Shipment Watch Agent

Nina is a purpose-built agent within Nauta's operational brain. Her job is purchase order visibility, from the moment a PO is issued to the moment the goods are received.

She monitors every open order continuously. She tracks supplier confirmations, links bookings to the originating PO, and follows shipment movement across domestic and international legs. When an order goes silent, with no confirmation, no booking, or no movement update within an expected window, Nina flags it.

She doesn’t just flag it. She drafts a chase request: a ready-to-send message to the supplier or carrier asking for a status update. Your team reviews it, approves it, and sends it. No portal login required. No digging through inboxes.

Nina surfaces only what needs a decision. Everything else runs in the background.

How It Works in Practice

Nina connects to the same unified data layer that powers the rest of Nauta. That layer ingests data from your ERP, TMS, WMS, supplier emails, and carrier portals, then normalizes it into a single operational view.

When a PO is created in your ERP, Nina starts watching it. She knows what a normal confirmation timeline looks like for that supplier. She knows when a booking should appear. She knows when a shipment should move. If any step falls outside expected parameters, she surfaces the exception.

The most time-consuming part of manual order tracking isn't reading the data. It's the follow-up. Drafting the same email for the tenth time that week. Waiting for a reply. Logging the response somewhere useful.

Nina handles the drafting. When an order needs a nudge, she writes the message, pre-populated with the relevant PO number, expected date, and supplier contact. Your team approves it in seconds. The communication goes out. The response comes back into the same thread Nina is already monitoring.

Nina doesn't ask your team to check a dashboard. She brings the exception to them. This is the distinction between visibility software and visibility intelligence. A dashboard shows you everything. An agent shows you what matters. Your team doesn't need to scan 200 open orders every morning. They need to know which three orders are at risk today. That's what Nina delivers.

The Outcome: 15 Hours Back Every Week

For the operations team running this process manually, the shift was immediate.

Before Nina, three team members each spent roughly five hours a week on order status work, checking portals, parsing emails, updating the shared tracker, and answering internal questions about where a shipment stood.

After Nina, that work largely disappeared. Every open PO was visible from creation to delivery without anyone logging into a portal. Supplier confirmations were tracked automatically. Chase requests went out on time, every time, without someone having to remember to send them.

Fifteen hours a week returned to the team, redirected toward work that actually requires human judgment.

The coverage extended across both domestic and international orders, which matters for teams managing mixed supplier networks where lead times and communication norms vary significantly by origin.

Where Nina Fits in Nauta

Nina doesn’t operate in isolation. She runs on the same unified data layer as every other Nauta agent.

Alec, the Document Control Agent, handles document intake, classification, and matching, catching missing or inconsistent documents before they cause delays. Marcus, the Inventory Watch Agent, tracks demand signals and predicts stockouts weeks before they affect fill rates. Nina handles the order-to-delivery visibility layer.

Together, they cover the three operational domains where manual work accumulates fastest: inventory, logistics, and procurement. Each agent draws from the same harmonized data. Each one surfaces only the exceptions that need human attention.

This is what exception-based operations looks like in practice. Not a bigger dashboard. Not more alerts. Fewer decisions, better timed, with the context already attached.

What This Means for Your Team

If someone on your team is spending hours each week tracking down order status, that's not a people problem. It's a data architecture problem. The information exists. It's just scattered across systems that were never designed to share it.

Nauta connects those systems and puts agents to work on the monitoring. Your team stops being the connective tissue between your ERP and your suppliers’ portals. They start doing the work that actually moves the business forward.

To see how Nina and the rest of the Nauta agents work for your operation, book a demo at getnauta.com.