What chasing late deliveries is actually costing your business

If you run a trade counter, a builders' merchant, or any business that sources and sells materials, late deliveries are part of the working week. That is not the problem. The problem is what happens next: someone has to find out where the order is, let the customer know, follow up again if the supplier doesn't respond, and do the same thing for the next overdue order on the list. Most of that work is mechanical, and most of it doesn't need to be done by a person.

The follow-up loop that nobody tracks

When an order goes past its expected delivery date, the follow-up typically looks like this: check the order management system (or the spreadsheet, or the notebook) to see what was expected and when; ring or email the supplier; note what they said; pass the update to whoever is waiting. If the supplier doesn't have an answer, the same call or message happens again in a day or two.

Individually, each of those steps is quick. Together, across all the orders that are running late at any given time, they add up to a meaningful chunk of someone's week — not emergency work, not billable time, just steady overhead that repeats until the goods arrive.

Most small businesses don't count this time, because it is never quite late enough or big enough to justify a formal process. It is just the background noise of running a stock-based business.

What it actually costs

Without tracked hours, the best estimate is usually intuitive: a couple of hours a week, maybe more in busy periods. A counter manager or office administrator handling a dozen active supplier relationships will have at least two or three overdue lines at any given time. Add second and third follow-ups for the ones that don't get answered first time, and the time per week — checking, calling, noting, updating — can run to three or four hours in a busy period.

That is time that isn't going on orders, customers, or anything that brings money in. It is a tax on every delivery that runs late, and it scales with the volume of the business rather than being a fixed cost.

What automating it could look like

An automation for this task would work from a live view of outstanding orders — anything past its expected delivery date. For each overdue line it would send a structured follow-up to the relevant supplier: a short, factual request for an updated ETA, logged against the order reference. If no response came back within a set window, it would escalate — flag it to the manager, or send a second message automatically.

The output is a live status for every overdue order, maintained without anyone having to manually track it day to day. The owner or counter manager would still handle the calls that need judgement — a supplier relationship worth managing personally, a delivery that needs to be cancelled outright, a dispute that has moved past a simple ETA question. What comes off their desk is the mechanical part: the first message, the chase, the note about what came back.

What it wouldn't do

Automating supplier follow-up does not fix late deliveries — it keeps them visible and chased without manual effort. If a supplier is consistently late, that is a supplier relationship conversation, not a workflow problem. And if your order data is spread across systems that do not connect cleanly, the setup work has to include sorting that first before the automation can be reliable.

The question this post is really asking is whether this task costs your business as much as we suspect it does — and whether getting the follow-up off your plate would be worth the setup.

If your week includes a regular block of time chasing deliveries, get in touch at hello@dooco.com or see the full range of what dooco builds at /services.