The shop is on a single line, one shift, and one buyer who is also the foreman who is also the office manager. The biggest job for purchase order automation on that line is not "find a vendor." It's "make sure the PO is sitting in front of the buyer, populated, ready to approve, before the buzzer that means we are out of a part becomes the buzzer that means we are down a machine."
Off-the-shelf PO systems were built for the multi-plant procurement team. PO automation for small job shops has to assume a single buyer, a single approval threshold, and a parts list that fits on two pages. That is the gap Fortera fills — not by replacing the spreadsheet, but by drafting the approval-ready PO before the spreadsheet alerts you.
The three steps that replace "I noticed we were out"
Fortera's procurement pipeline mirrors what a tight shop floor already does with a whiteboard — it just does it before the buyer leaves the floor to chase stock.
The whole loop runs against the same procurement pipeline shipped by Fortera — built around the small job shop's single buyer, not the procurement department at a multi-plant OEM. If you want to see what the PO draft actually looks like before you commit, Pricing has the walkthrough.
What changes on the floor
A shop that stops being the routing layer between an alert and a PO gets its buyer back. The purchase order automation loop shortens from "noticed at standup, drafted by 10am, approved by lunch" to "the buzzer that sounded when the part went below threshold is the same buzzer that drafted the PO." Anything else, talk to support.