Supplier is waiting on us — order on hold, response required

An order sitting on hold at the factory is an order that is not moving, and the reason is almost always something the supplier needs from you. This Watch finds those and puts the deadline in front of you. In Settings → Workspace → Watches it sits under Supplier Integration as SI-2.

What it watches for

• An open purchase order on a hold that needs something from you — order entry, credit, a proof, artwork, a back-order decision, shipping instructions, or a customer-supplied item.
• A supplier email asking a question about a purchase order with no reply from you past your reminder delay.
• A proof hold where the customer's approval is already sitting in somebody's mailbox and was never relayed to the supplier.

Each point carries the deadline the supplier set, the contact who asked, and the supplier's own resolution link where they publish one.

Why it matters

Holds are not usually missed out of carelessness. They arrive as one line in a status feed or as an email that lands while you are on the phone, and then a week goes by. Meanwhile the production clock is stopped and the in-hands date is not. Catching a hold on the day it appears usually costs one email; catching it a week later costs a rush charge, a split shipment, or a conversation with the customer you did not want to have.

This Watch books as Avoided on the Found ledger.

What it needs connected

• Required: a supplier feed. This Watch cannot run without one — the hold itself lives in the supplier's data.
• Helpful: a mailbox, your accounting system, a CRM. The mailbox is what lets Scout notice that the customer's proof approval already arrived, and accounting is what lets it recognize a credit hold for what it is.

What the point looks like

A point is one item Scout raises with the proof behind it. This one arrives in the Inbox as a recommendation:

Alpha Apparel is holding the Camp Canine order for proof approval — Camp Canine · respond by Thursday

JOB-2214 went on a proof hold two days ago and Alpha Apparel needs an answer by Thursday to keep the August 10 in-hands date. Maya Torres approved proof v2 in your mailbox yesterday morning — that approval has not gone back to the supplier.

Evidence: the supplier hold record with its response deadline · Maya's approval email in Gmail · business-day math to the deadline.

Prepared by Scout: a reply to the supplier carrying the approval, plus the supplier's resolution link.

The setting that tunes it

This Watch reads the workspace Reminder delay: how long a supplier question can sit unanswered before Scout raises it. The choices are 1 business day, 2 business days or 3 business days, and the default is 2. It is shared with FO-1, waiting on a reply, so changing it from either Watch changes it for both.

Note that a hold with an explicit deadline from the supplier is raised against that deadline, not against your reminder delay. The reminder delay governs the unanswered-question case.

When it arrives

This is one of the launch-wave Watches, and one of the four built on Scout's supplier engine. It is not raising points today — its row in Settings reads Coming soon. The reminder delay you set now is already in force for the Watch that uses it today, and it will apply to this one when it launches. We do not publish a date for it.

Good to know

• Scout never answers a supplier for you. It assembles the reply — including the approval or the information they asked for — and you send it.
• Because a supplier feed is required, this Watch shows under the Needs attention filter in Settings until you have one connected.
• Not every supplier publishes holds with a response deadline. Where the deadline is not published, the point still names the hold and the contact.
• A purchase order the supplier never acknowledged at all belongs to SI-1, not here.