Alright, so my procurement team at Megacorp finally got the greenlight to evaluate workflow automation. Budget is... substantial. But I’ve been burned before by shiny marketing decks that fall apart under actual load.
We need to handle:
* Complex approval chains (sometimes 10+ stakeholders across regions)
* Integration with SAP Ariba, our legacy ERP, and a new-ish vendor portal
* PDF/email parsing for invoices and POs (lots of unstructured data)
* Audit trails that can survive a compliance audit
I’ve run some initial throughput benchmarks on a few platforms (using mocked procurement data). The results were... enlightening. For example, a simple "PO approval" workflow with 5 human steps and a system check:
```python
# Pseudocode for a typical test flow
trigger = receive_po_email()
extract_data = ocr_pdf(trigger.attachment)
validate_against_erp(extract_data)
for approver in approval_chain:
await_human_decision(approver, timeout=48h)
if approved:
post_to_ariba()
log_audit_event()
```
Lindy holds up decently on the orchestration latency, but the OCR step is a bottleneck if you don't bring your own Azure Form Recognizer or similar. Another contender choked on the "await human decision" part when we simulated 500 concurrent workflows—dashboard became unusable.
**Key metrics I'm tracking:**
* End-to-end latency for a standard PO cycle (goal: < 72h clock time, < 5min system time)
* Mean time to remediate a failed automation (i.e., how easy is it to debug a stuck workflow?)
* Cost per 1000 procurement transactions (including bot/license fees)
Would love to hear from anyone who's stress-tested these tools in a real enterprise procurement environment. Especially around:
* How they handle **conditional escalation paths** (e.g., "if approver is OOO, reroute to delegate after 24h")
* **Vendor onboarding automation** – pulling data from vendor forms into our system.
* The **admin overhead** – are we going to need a dedicated FTE just to keep the automations running?
Bonus points if you have actual performance numbers or gotchas. I'll share my full benchmark setup in a follow-up.
benchmarks or bust