Pacifica vs project management tools
A Kanban board of purchase orders works — for about a month.
Why teams try it
Asana, Trello, Notion and Monday are flexible, familiar and cheap. A board with a column per stage and a card per PO looks exactly like what procurement needs, and for a small team it is a real improvement over a spreadsheet.
Why it stops working
Every card has to be moved by hand, and every fact on it typed. The supplier's ETD change is in an email; someone has to read it, find the card and edit it. The B/L is an attachment somewhere; someone has to upload it. The invoice status is in the ERP; nobody copies it. Within weeks the board is a second job, and then it is out of date, and then it is abandoned.
At a glance
| Generic PM tool | Pacifica | |
|---|---|---|
| Stages | Columns you define | Fourteen trade stages, configurable, with per-stage meaning; cross-border and domestic sets |
| Moving a card | By hand | Inferred from evidence: PO in ERP, B/L received, carrier arrival, goods receipt, invoice posted |
| Facts on the card | Typed | Read from emails, documents, ERP and carriers, with source and time |
| Suppliers | Guests, if at all | Reply to email; one account across buyers |
| Documents | Attachments | Classified per type, required per destination, versioned |
| Payments, free time, certifications | Custom fields nobody fills | Built in |
| Customers | Share a board | Magic link |
Keep the tool for what it's good at
Internal projects, launches, to-dos. Let Pacifica hold the orders, and link to it from the project when you need to.
Related
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