In 2025, a surprising number of steel service centers still fax purchase orders to mills. Some mills still require it. Some service centers do it because that is how they have always done it. Either way, the practice costs more than the paper and toner.
What Faxing Actually Costs
A faxed purchase order is a one-way, undocumented communication. It leaves the service center with no automatic confirmation of receipt, no digital record linked to the inventory system, and no ability to track the order status without a phone call.
The purchasing agent faxes the PO, then calls the mill rep to confirm receipt. The mill rep confirms verbally. Two weeks later, the purchasing agent calls again to check lead time. Four weeks later, they call to confirm the shipping date. Each call takes 5 to 15 minutes. Across 50 to 100 purchase orders per month, the phone time alone is 25 to 75 hours monthly.
Compare this to electronic ordering. The PO is submitted digitally. The mill system confirms receipt automatically. Order status updates flow back to the service center's system in real time. The purchasing agent sees "shipped, tracking number XYZ, estimated arrival Thursday" without making a single phone call.
The time difference per order is 15 to 30 minutes. At 75 orders per month, that is 19 to 37 hours per month. At $35 per hour, the annual cost of faxing versus electronic ordering is $8,000 to $15,500 in labor alone.
The Data Gap
Faxed POs create a data gap between the purchasing decision and the inventory system. The PO exists on paper (or as a scanned image), but the expected delivery date, the confirmed pricing, and the order status are not connected to the inventory system until the material arrives and is manually received.
This gap means the sales team cannot see incoming material. A rep quoting a customer on 16-gauge CRC might not know that 20 tons are arriving from the mill next Tuesday. They tell the customer the material is out of stock and suggest a 6-week lead time. The customer goes to a competitor. The material arrives Tuesday and sits in inventory while the sale that could have used it was lost three days earlier.
Electronic purchase orders feed expected delivery dates and quantities into the inventory system as "on order." The sales team sees available inventory (in stock) plus incoming inventory (on order, arriving Tuesday). They can quote the customer with confidence: "We will have your material by Wednesday."
Making the Transition
Not every mill offers electronic ordering. Some smaller mills and specialty producers still operate on fax and phone. But the major domestic producers (Nucor, Steel Dynamics, CMC, SSAB) and large distributors offer electronic PO submission and order tracking.
The transition does not require a major technology project. Most modern steel platforms support EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) or API connections with major mills. The setup is typically a one-time configuration per supplier, taking days, not months.
For mills that still require fax, the service center's system can generate a fax automatically from a digital PO, maintaining the data connection internally while meeting the supplier's communication requirement. The fax becomes an output format, not a workflow.
The fax machine is not a charming anachronism. It is a productivity drain hiding in plain sight. Every service center that still relies on fax-based purchasing is paying a hidden tax in labor, lost sales, and data gaps. The fix is straightforward and the ROI is immediate.