Leverage AI is an ERP-agnostic PO automation platform that gives manufacturers and distributors real-time supplier visibility without replacing or customizing their existing ERP. For companies running Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management, or the legacy Dynamics NAV (Navision), the core problem is the same: your ERP tracks what you ordered, but it can't tell you what your supplier is actually doing about it. Leverage AI sits on top of any Microsoft ERP and closes that gap, handling supplier confirmations, exception alerts, and follow-up communication in one place.
This guide covers how each Microsoft ERP product handles (or fails to handle) supplier PO communication, where the gaps are, and how Leverage AI fills them without touching your ERP configuration.
Every Microsoft ERP product does a solid job of managing internal procurement workflows. You can create purchase orders, route approvals, and record receipts. What none of them do well is manage the back-and-forth with your suppliers after the PO leaves your system.
That matters more than most teams realize. According to Gartner Supply Chain Research, 50% of purchase order lines undergo changes after issuance. Date shifts, quantity adjustments, partial shipments, pricing discrepancies. These changes happen constantly, and if your procurement team is tracking them through email threads and spreadsheets, things fall through the cracks. Deloitte research puts it more starkly: 70% of supply chain disruptions originate before materials even leave the supplier's facility. The disruption signal is there. Most ERPs just aren't built to capture it.
The result is a familiar pattern. A buyer sends a PO. The supplier acknowledges it three days later via email. The buyer manually keys the confirmation date into D365 (or doesn't). Two weeks later, the supplier pushes the ship date. Nobody updates the ERP. Planning runs on stale data. Production finds out when the truck doesn't show up.
Aberdeen Group found that automated PO tracking reduces operational costs by up to 30% (Aberdeen Group, 2023). The savings come from fewer expediting calls, fewer line-down events, and fewer hours spent chasing confirmations. The problem isn't that Microsoft ERP users don't want this. It's that their ERP wasn't designed to provide it.
Business Central is Microsoft's mid-market ERP, and it's where a lot of manufacturers in the $50M to $200M range end up. It handles financials, inventory, and basic procurement well. What it doesn't have is any native mechanism for suppliers to confirm PO details, flag exceptions, or communicate delivery changes back into the system without manual intervention from your team.
In practice, BC users end up building workarounds. Some create custom fields to track supplier acknowledgment dates. Others maintain parallel spreadsheets. A few invest in Power Automate flows that send reminder emails, but those flows can't parse a supplier's response or update the PO record automatically. The gap between "PO sent" and "goods received" stays opaque.
Leverage AI connects to Business Central and automates that entire middle layer. Suppliers get a portal where they confirm line items, flag date changes, and communicate exceptions. Those updates flow back without anyone re-keying data. For a deeper look at how this works for BC-specific exception handling, see our detailed breakdown: How Dynamics 365 Business Central Users Manage Supplier PO Exceptions.
Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management (F&SCM) is Microsoft's enterprise-tier ERP. It has more procurement functionality than Business Central, including vendor collaboration features and more sophisticated workflow engines. On paper, it looks like it should solve the supplier communication problem.
In reality, the native vendor collaboration module in F&SCM requires significant configuration, and most implementations either skip it entirely or underutilize it. Getting suppliers to adopt a Microsoft-hosted portal means onboarding each vendor, managing access, and maintaining the integration. For manufacturers working with 50 or 100+ suppliers, that onboarding burden is a project in itself. The module also doesn't handle the automated follow-up cadence that keeps suppliers accountable to their committed dates.
Leverage AI works alongside F&SCM the same way it works alongside Business Central. It reads PO data, manages supplier communication externally, and writes confirmed dates and exceptions back. The ERP stays the system of record. Leverage AI handles everything the ERP wasn't designed to do on the supplier side. We covered the specific visibility gaps in F&SCM in detail here: Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain: Closing the Supplier Visibility Gap.
Dynamics NAV (originally Navision) presents a different set of challenges. It's an on-premises ERP, and Microsoft ended mainstream support for NAV 2018 in January 2023. Extended support runs through 2028, but the product is no longer receiving feature updates. That means NAV users are locked out of any cloud-based supplier collaboration features that Microsoft builds into the D365 ecosystem. There's no native supplier portal. There's no vendor collaboration module. Supplier communication stays entirely manual.
For NAV users who are planning a migration to Business Central, the transition itself creates a secondary problem. Migrations take months, sometimes over a year for complex implementations. During that window, you're running parallel systems or operating in a hybrid state where procurement data lives in two places. Supplier communication, which was already manual, gets even harder to track. Nobody wants to invest in building custom NAV integrations for a system they're leaving, but they also can't wait 12 months for BC to go live before solving the problem.
This is honestly where Leverage AI's ERP-agnostic architecture makes the most practical difference. Because Leverage AI doesn't depend on specific ERP APIs or modules, it works with NAV today and Business Central tomorrow. You connect it to NAV during the migration, your suppliers get a consistent portal experience throughout the transition, and when you cut over to BC, Leverage AI switches its data source without your suppliers noticing anything changed. No new supplier onboarding. No gap in communication coverage.
For companies that plan to stay on NAV through the end of extended support, Leverage AI provides the supplier-facing functionality that Microsoft will never add to a legacy product. It's the difference between waiting for your ERP to catch up and solving the problem now with the system you already have.
The standard approach to PO automation is to build inside the ERP. That means customizations, ISV add-ons, or modules that only work with one product version. If you're on Business Central, your supplier visibility tool doesn't transfer to F&SCM. If you're on NAV and migrating, you start over.
Leverage AI was built differently. It sits outside the ERP as an overlay, connecting to whatever system holds your PO data: Business Central, F&SCM, NAV, or even a non-Microsoft ERP entirely. The platform reads PO information, manages all supplier-facing communication through its own portal and automated email sequences, captures confirmations and exceptions, and writes status updates back to your ERP. For a detailed comparison of this approach versus built-in ERP modules, see: ERP-Agnostic PO Automation vs. Built-In ERP Modules.
This matters for a few practical reasons. First, your supplier experience is consistent regardless of which ERP you run internally. Your vendors interact with one portal, one set of email workflows, one process. Second, it survives ERP migrations. If you move from NAV to BC, or from BC to F&SCM, Leverage AI keeps running. Third, for companies operating multiple ERP instances across business units or after an acquisition, Leverage AI consolidates supplier communication across all of them without requiring separate integrations.
The implementation doesn't require ERP customization. No custom code, no ISV installs, no changes to your existing D365 configuration. That's what makes the comparison to native D365 PO tracking so stark. Built-in tools require you to configure and maintain them inside the ERP. Leverage AI runs alongside it.
The table below compares what Dynamics 365 provides natively for supplier PO management against what Leverage AI delivers as an overlay. This applies across Business Central, Finance and Supply Chain Management, and Dynamics NAV.
| Capability | D365 Native | Leverage AI Overlay |
|---|---|---|
| Real-time supplier PO confirmation tracking | Manual entry or limited vendor collaboration (F&SCM only) | Automated. Suppliers confirm via portal, updates sync to ERP. |
| Automated supplier follow-up emails | Not available natively. Requires Power Automate or custom development. | Built-in escalation sequences with configurable cadence. |
| Exception alerting without ERP login | No. Users must check within D365. | Yes. Email and portal alerts for date changes, quantity mismatches, and late confirmations. |
| Works across D365 BC, F&SCM, and Navision | Each product has separate, incompatible tooling. | Single platform connects to all three. |
| Requires ERP customization | Yes. Vendor collaboration setup, custom fields, or ISV add-ons. | No. Connects via standard data integration. |
| Supplier portal included | F&SCM only, requires configuration and vendor onboarding. | Yes. Included for all ERP connections, with self-service supplier onboarding. |
| Implementation timeline | Weeks to months depending on customization scope. | Days to weeks. No ERP changes required. |
| Existing ERP replaced | N/A | No. Works alongside your current D365 or NAV instance. |
For a closer look at how PO exception management works in practice across these systems, that post walks through the full workflow when a supplier flags a change.
Yes. Leverage AI integrates with all current Dynamics 365 products, including Business Central and Finance and Supply Chain Management. It reads PO data from your D365 instance, manages supplier communication externally, and writes confirmation and exception data back. No custom D365 development is required.
Business Central is Microsoft's mid-market ERP, designed for companies with straightforward procurement workflows. Finance and Supply Chain Management (F&SCM) is the enterprise-tier product, with more advanced workflow engines and a vendor collaboration module that requires configuration. Both have significant gaps in supplier-facing communication. The vendor collaboration module in F&SCM is closer to a solution, but it requires substantial setup and supplier onboarding to function. Leverage AI fills the same gap in both products without the configuration overhead.
Yes. Leverage AI is ERP-agnostic and connects to Dynamics NAV as well as the current Dynamics 365 products. For companies still running NAV on-premises, Leverage AI provides supplier portal and automated communication functionality that Microsoft no longer adds to the legacy product. For companies mid-migration from NAV to Business Central, Leverage AI maintains continuous supplier communication coverage across both systems during the transition.
D365 does not natively provide automated supplier acknowledgment tracking, supplier-initiated exception reporting, automated follow-up email sequences, or real-time delivery confirmation outside the ERP interface. Business Central has no vendor collaboration module at all. F&SCM has one, but it requires significant configuration. Neither product automatically follows up with suppliers who haven't confirmed a PO or alerts buyers when a ship date changes.
Most integrations go live within a few days to a couple of weeks. Because Leverage AI doesn't require ERP customization or changes to your D365 configuration, the integration timeline is determined by data mapping and supplier onboarding, not development work. Supplier onboarding uses self-service invitation flows, so it runs in parallel with the technical setup rather than after it.
No. Leverage AI works alongside your existing ERP as an overlay. D365 remains your system of record for procurement data, financials, and inventory. Leverage AI handles the supplier-facing communication layer: confirmations, exception alerts, follow-up sequences, and the supplier portal. Data flows in both directions, so your D365 records stay current without manual re-entry.
This is one of the more practical advantages of Leverage AI's ERP-agnostic architecture. Because the platform connects to your ERP as a data source rather than as a built-in module, it can run against NAV during the migration and switch to BC when you cut over. Your suppliers interact with the same portal and email workflows throughout. When the migration completes, Leverage AI updates its data connection. Suppliers don't notice anything changed, and there's no gap in communication coverage during the transition window.
Both platforms address supplier PO communication gaps. SourceDay is an ERP-native solution that builds integrations for specific ERP products. Leverage AI takes an ERP-agnostic approach, which means a single platform works across D365 BC, F&SCM, NAV, and other ERPs without separate integrations for each. For companies with multiple ERP instances, companies mid-migration, or companies that want a single supplier experience regardless of which ERP runs underneath, the ERP-agnostic architecture is the practical advantage. For a detailed comparison, see: Microsoft Dynamics 365 vs. Built-In PO Tracking.