Purchasing manager creates a draft purchasing order based on the aggregated report of all requests for materials by engineers. It contains individual quantities for the same material per each project. When exported to PDF or EXCEL the quantities are aggregated per material (ignoring the projects) and the file is then sent to a bunch of suppliers to get their quotes.
Recently an external platform for reverse auctions began being used and the roles have changed - now suppliers are the more active party rather than the purchasing department.

The quotes are reviewed and the prices are approved by a supervisor. The draft purchasing order is then manually split into smaller orders according to the approval (i.e. materials A and B from supplier X, materials C, D and E from supplier Y, the rest from supplier Z) which are then sent to the suppliers as actual orders.

When materials arrive at the warehouse the stock keeper selects the supplier and instantly sees what has been ordered. She then simply enters the arrived quantities and the ERP makes connection to the corresponding purchasing order. The purchasing manager sees when a purchasing order has fully arrived at the warehouse and the engineer sees that his request for materials has been fulfilled.

The materials hierarchy comes from the accounting software. The module encourages employees to maintain a list of suppliers with their contact details and then allows mapping between materials and suppliers so newcomers can easily find which are the suppliers for any given material or which materials a given supplier is able to deliver.