3x Procurement Productivity—See How Axya + Genius Work Together

If your buyers spend half their day chasing supplier confirmations by email, this session shows exactly what that looks like once it’s automated. Frank hosts Alex, who manages customer success at Axya, alongside Tracy Johnson, a purchasing manager with decades of supply chain experience who’s used the Genius-Axya integration at her own company for about a year. Alex is upfront that this isn’t a sales pitch — it’s a look at where procurement work actually goes off the rails: once a PO is sent, the follow-up work (confirmations, date and price changes, supplier updates) tends to happen entirely outside the ERP, in email and spreadsheets, leaving both the ERP and the buyer’s visibility out of date. Axya’s fix is a collaborative platform synced directly to Genius: it automates supplier follow-ups on a schedule you control, lets suppliers reply by normal email or a login-free link to propose changes, and syncs approved changes straight back into Genius — regenerated PDF included. Tracy’s feedback throughout is refreshingly candid: real time savings, real supplier pushback in some cases, and a genuinely easy IT rollout. If your team’s ERP data is only ever as accurate as your last manual follow-up email, this is worth a look.

What You’ll Learn In This Webinar

Chapter 1 — Overview of Genius ERP

Frank gives the standard Genius overview: 35 years in business, 140+ employees, a 96% customer retention rate, and a focus on custom manufacturers (engineer-to-order, configure-to-order, design-to-order, make-to-order), with CAD2BOM integration, a scheduling tool built around theory of constraints and drum-buffer-rope, and built-in analytics — covering everything from quoting and estimating to scheduling, purchasing, inventory, and project billing.

Chapter 2 — Transition to Axia Presentation

Alex clarifies upfront that this isn’t a sales pitch, but a look at real procurement challenges and how Axya’s platform addresses them, with Tracy on hand for a customer’s perspective. Axya is described as a collaborative platform designed to optimize procurement operations for manufacturers, aimed at increasing buyer productivity and giving end-to-end visibility into procurement, operations, and supplier KPIs.

Chapter 3 — Tracy’s Insights on Cement Tech

Tracy describes her company (founded in 1969): it makes volumetric concrete mixer trucks — a compartmented “box” with a large water tank that lets customers pour exactly the amount of concrete they need on-site, rather than working in batches like traditional rotating-drum trucks. The company is international, with a UK division, and counts municipalities and the military among its larger customers. Her procurement team is lean — herself plus two buyers — managing a variety of suppliers, many producing parts unique to the company’s non-standardized product line.

Chapter 4 — Challenges in Procurement Before Axia

Before Axya, procurement ran almost entirely on email: sending POs, waiting (and hoping) for a confirmation, and manually re-pinging suppliers who didn’t respond. Axya’s automatic, configurable follow-up cadence was a major improvement — Tracy notes that being able to tailor how often the system follows up matters, since over-emailing suppliers risks making them resistant to the tool altogether.

Chapter 5 — Industry-Wide Procurement Challenges

Alex generalizes what he sees across manufacturers using any ERP, not just Genius: the actual back-and-forth of procurement — supplier confirmations, updates, changes — happens almost entirely outside the system, through email, spreadsheets, and PDFs. That makes supplier KPIs and internal visibility hard to track, and leaves the ERP’s own data less accurate than it should be until someone manually follows up and updates it.

Chapter 6 — Introduction to Axia’s Solution

Axya integrates directly with Genius as a collaborative platform covering both internal collaboration (operations and production teams needing part status) and supplier collaboration (confirmations, updates). Its focus is the stretch of the PO lifecycle between creation and receipt — the part of the process Alex says is “less structured” and where most manual, email-based work happens today.

“It’s not a lot of clicks — that’s really where a lot of time waste and opportunity to automate is.” — Alex

Chapter 7 — Demo of Axia’s Features

In a live demo: changing a PO’s status to an Axya-specific status in Genius and saving triggers the workflow, sending suppliers a trackable email with the PO PDF attached. In Axya’s own dashboard, an Orders tab shows every synced PO with its buyer(s), supplier, and status (on track, late/awaiting review, or shipped but not received); opening an order shows Genius-sourced details alongside a communication panel that threads together supplier email replies and internal team comments. Automatic, smart follow-ups are scheduled against due and shipping dates rather than relying on a buyer to trigger them manually. Suppliers can simply reply to the email as normal, or click a login-free link to propose changes to price, date, or quantity directly; a buyer reviews each proposed change line by line, approves or rejects it, and approved changes sync automatically back into Genius, including a regenerated PDF with updated terms. An Analytics page tracks supplier KPIs automatically — on-time delivery, frequency of date or price changes, average lateness — without manual data entry, and a Parts tab lets internal stakeholders search by job number or part to find and open the relevant PO thread directly. RFQ handling exists as a separate module but wasn’t demoed today for time.

Chapter 8 — Feedback on Implementation and Change Management

Tracy describes major time savings compared to manually confirming and updating each PO line in Genius, and notes suppliers have generally been receptive since replying only requires email or a login-free link — unlike other portals that require a username and password. Some suppliers still won’t engage with Axya directly, so her team has them email confirmations back and processes those manually as a workaround — which Alex notes is exactly what Axya’s Outlook integration is built to streamline, tagging a normal email reply to the right PO thread even for the estimated 10-15% of suppliers who don’t engage with the platform directly. Tracy also discusses supplier scorecards: she already ran quarterly KPI reviews with suppliers before Axya, and is working with Axya to incorporate its automatically tracked data into that process, noting the KPI features themselves are only a few months old.

Chapter 9 — Seamless Integration with Genius ERP

Tracy says IT implementation was largely seamless — data was transferred, some setup was done, and the team was ready to go, without needing a dedicated project manager, either for the initial rollout or for ongoing maintenance and enhancements. Alex confirms this is a deliberate result of the Genius partnership: while integrating Axya with other ERPs can take weeks or months, the Genius integration typically takes about half a meeting with IT.

Chapter 10 — Upcoming Events and Next Steps

Alex offers a simple self-assessment form (employee count, monthly order volume, number of buyers) that generates a quick procurement “health check,” and clarifies that RFQ handling is a separate module some customers use alongside the PO workflow shown today. Frank shares several QR codes: one to learn more about Axya or connect with customer success, one for prospects new to Genius, one for the Sept. 18 customer conference (a “Summit on AI and Automation” in Montreal, already selling briskly) alongside a preview webinar on Aug. 26, and one to book a free business review with the customer success team.