A call to a supplier is four minutes. Ask anyone in procurement and that is the figure you get, and it is roughly right — four minutes from dialling to writing the price down, assuming the person you need is at the desk and the product is one they carry.
The trouble is that the four minutes is the only part of the job that anyone counts. Around it sits the part that is never on anyone's calendar: finding the eight numbers in the first place, discovering that three of them ring out, leaving a message with a colleague who will pass it on, taking the call back forty minutes later in the middle of something else, and then doing the whole thing again tomorrow because two suppliers said they would check stock and did not ring.
The arithmetic nobody writes down
Take one ordinary request — a fitting, a fastener, a length of cable — and follow it honestly from start to finish:
One request, followed honestly
- 1Finding candidatesA search, a directory, two WhatsApp groups, and a look through last year's invoices.
- 2DiallingAbout half connect first time. The rest need a second attempt, usually on another day.
- 3WaitingThe warehouse check, the manager who is out, the one who asks you to send it in writing.
- 4ChasingThe follow-up nobody enjoys, which is why it is the step most often skipped.
- 5ComparingEight prices in eight formats, half of them for different quantities.
None of those steps is difficult. Every one of them is interruptible, and that is what makes them expensive. A four-minute call that has to be attempted three times across two days is not twelve minutes of work — it is twelve minutes of work spread over two days of remembering to do it.
What gets quietly dropped
The predictable response to a job like that is to make it smaller. Ring four suppliers instead of eight. Ring the three you rang last time. Take the first price that is not obviously wrong and move on, because there are nine other requisitions waiting and none of them will be improved by spending another afternoon on this one.
The price you accept is rarely the best price available. It is the best price you had the time to find.
That is not a failure of diligence. It is a completely rational response to a process where the cost of asking one more supplier is paid by the person asking, and the benefit is uncertain. Shrink the cost of asking and the behaviour changes on its own — nobody has to be persuaded to be more thorough when thoroughness stops being expensive.
Calling suppliers for quotes in parallel, not in sequence
The reason ringing round takes a morning is not that each call is slow. It is that a person can only hold one conversation at a time, so eight calls happen one after another, and every gap between them is dead time that belongs to the request.
Same eight calls, drawn to the same scale
This is the specific constraint the voice agent in our AI procurement platform removes. It places the calls at the same time rather than one after another, holds each conversation on its own — asking price, availability and delivery against your specification — and moves to WhatsApp and email where a call does not land. Ordinary requests come back as a ranked comparison in around twelve minutes, and every quote in it is attached to a recording and a transcript, so a number can be traced back to the sentence a supplier said it in.
Twelve minutes is not interesting because it is fast. It is interesting because it is short enough that asking eight suppliers instead of four stops being a decision at all.
If you would rather watch it than read about it, see the agent call a real supplier for something you actually buy — and with talk-minute pricing, a call nobody answers costs nothing.