Ask most procurement leaders why maverick spend keeps landing on their desk and you get a list of other people’s failings. Stakeholders ignore the policy. The business does not plan. Finance signed off without asking. Tom Mills, a procurement trainer recently discussed it and offered a less comfortable answer: the function is hiding behind forms, templates and chatbots.
The intake form asks the questions that should be a conversation. The policy link gets sent instead of someone picking up the phone. The chatbot logs the exception and nobody talks it through. His fix was four questions rather than four controls. Ask straight whether the request really needs to bypass the process or whether it is just easier. Talk through the risk together rather than assuming the requester knows what “low value” means when they have never seen the contract. Spell out what saying yes exposes, for the business and for the individual. And ask what happened upstream, because most one-off exceptions are a planning conversation that never took place.
The responses came from CPOs, category leads, consultants and operators across manufacturing, energy, oil and gas, and retail. The agreement was broad. The sharpest contributions were the ones that pushed back.
Spend Is Like Water
The reframing that stuck came from Michael Shields, VP of Procurement at Tropic. “Spend is like water. It will take the path of least resistance in most situations. Instead of asking why is there so much maverick spend, I try to ask how can I change my process to be a better experience.”
That shifts the problem from behaviour to design. Water does not break the rules. It finds the gap.
Clarice Camacho, a global energy procurement and risk leader, extended the logic to its conclusion. “If the compliant route is slow, complicated, restrictive, or doesn’t meet the business need, people will find another way. That’s not simply a compliance problem. It’s a user experience problem.”
Her closing line is the standard the function should hold itself to. “The goal isn’t to catch maverick spend. The goal is to make it unnecessary.”
Georgia Giannia, a senior IT procurement professional, added the fifth step the original list was missing and grounded it in experience. “Make the compliant route genuinely faster than the workaround. People do not bypass process because they enjoy the risk, they bypass it because they have watched it take three weeks before.”
Veera Baskar K, a supply chain consultant to mid-sized manufacturers, proposed the measurement that proves which problem you actually have. “When the compliant buying route takes longer than the business can tolerate, people create their own route. Tracking exception reasons and procurement cycle time together can show whether it’s really a compliance issue or a process design issue.”
That is a diagnostic any function can run this quarter. If cycle time and exception volume move together, the process is the cause.
The Honest Dissent on Time
Mills listed “I don’t have time to talk everyone through it” among the excuses. Hamilton Lindley, VP of Procurement, Compliance and Risk, declined to accept that.
“Sometimes it is just true. Save the conversations for the exceptions that keep repeating, and make the rest of the route fast enough that nobody needs a workaround.”
That correction matters. A procurement team of six covering a thousand requisitions cannot talk every requester through the risk, and pretending otherwise produces guilt rather than change. The conversation is a scarce resource. Spend it on the repeat patterns and engineer the rest away.
Mills accepted the point. The reconciliation is that conversation and process design are not alternatives. Conversation diagnoses. Design fixes at scale.
Exceptions Are Data, Not Incidents
The most useful operational shift came from treating each bypass as information rather than misconduct.
Aleksandr Bondarenko, a manufacturing procurement manager, put it most clearly. “Every exception is telling us something: poor planning, gaps in supplier coverage, a process that’s too slow or rigid, or sometimes simply behaviour that needs to change. The conversation is important, but the real win is spotting the pattern behind the exceptions and fixing the system. Otherwise, we’re just getting better at managing the same problem.”
Mark Strange, a transformation leader, drew the line between symptom and cause. “If capable people repeatedly find ways around a process, I would want to understand what the process is making unnecessarily difficult before adding another control. Otherwise we risk treating the symptom while preserving the cause.”
Rob Colletti, a packaging specialist, delivered the line that exposes how rarely this happens: “The one-off exception that somehow happens 37 times a year.”
Sahil Pabbewar reframed the opening question itself. “The most effective procurement teams don’t just ask, why did you bypass the process? They ask, what happened that made bypassing the process feel like the easiest option? That shift from policing to understanding can uncover the root cause.”
The Case for Enforcement
Not everyone accepted the make-it-easier framing. John Kill, a fractional supply chain executive, argued for the blunt instrument.
“The fastest way to cure rogue spend is strictly enforce no PO, no pay. When a couple vendors get burned providing goods and services without Procurement’s authorization, they’ll stop doing favors for their buddies. When a couple employees get held accountable for violating the process, they’ll work within the system. I agree explaining the system is critical, but enforcement is key. The fastest way to get someone’s attention is the pocketbook.”
Mills conceded partially, calling it a blunt tool. Both are right in different conditions. No PO, no pay stops casual bypassing quickly. It does nothing about the requester who genuinely could not wait three weeks, and in that case it converts a visible exception into a hidden one.
Bright Afeikhe named the variable that decides whether enforcement works at all. “The singular most challenging issue is the will power of top management to enforce policies.”
Would You Hire Without HR?
The most quotable argument came from Elvire Regnier, a former CPO now advising on procurement transformation. “I always had this question in my mind: would someone recruit without HR? No, and no need for a policy, that’s obvious. So why would that same person commit the company fund without procurement?”
The analogy is uncomfortable because the answer is obvious. Nobody bypasses HR to hire, not because the policy is stronger, but because the involvement is assumed. Procurement has not reached that status in most organisations, and no amount of policy enforcement creates it.
Tianrong C., a procurement director at adidas, explained how the function loses that standing. “From time to time procurement professionals tend to stick to the playbook way too much which loses sight of how business operates and how fast a response it might request. If we try to walk in business’s shoes and think the other way round and work as a problem solver, then business will keep coming back for your help instead.”
Warren D’Cruz, a procurement strategy director, framed it as trust rather than compliance. “When stakeholders feel procurement is slowing them down, they’ll find ways around the process. The best procurement teams don’t just enforce policy, they influence decisions before spend occurs.”
Takeaways for Procurement Leaders
Three lessons run through the discussion. First, measure cycle time alongside exception volume. If the two move together, you have a process design problem wearing a compliance problem’s clothes, and another control will make it worse.
Second, ration the conversation deliberately. Nobody can talk every requester through the risk. Reserve the dialogue for repeating exceptions, then engineer the rest of the route fast enough that no workaround is needed.
Third, treat every bypass as a data point about the system. One exception is an incident. Thirty-seven of them in a year is a design specification nobody wrote down.
If your compliant route took three days instead of three weeks, how many of last year’s exceptions would still have happened?
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