Maverick spend — purchasing outside agreed contracts and processes — gets treated as a compliance failure. Occasionally it is. More often it’s a process failure that people are working around because the compliant route doesn’t meet a real need, and treating it as disobedience guarantees it continues.

What it Costs

Price, first. Off-contract purchases typically pay more, sometimes considerably more on items where negotiated rates exist.

Volume leverage, second and larger. Every off-contract purchase reduces the volume you can commit in negotiations, which weakens the rates for everything else. The compounding effect exceeds the direct premium.

Then quality and traceability risk from unapproved suppliers, administrative cost from one-off transactions, and a spend picture that’s simply wrong — you can’t negotiate well on categories where you don’t know what you actually buy.

Find Out Why it’s Happening

Before adding controls, ask the people doing it. The reasons are consistent and mostly legitimate.

The approved process is too slow. If a routine purchase takes five days to approve and production needs it tomorrow, someone will find another way. They should — the alternative is a stopped line.

Nobody knows the contract exists. Contracts get negotiated by procurement and never communicated to the people who requisition. This is the most common cause and the easiest to fix.

The contracted item doesn’t work. Engineering or production has a genuine preference the contract doesn’t accommodate, and nobody asked them before it was signed.

Urgency. Genuine emergencies happen and need a route that isn’t rule-breaking.

Fix The Process First

Speed up compliant purchasing. Most maverick spend disappears when the approved route becomes faster than the workaround. Automating low-value contracted purchases removes both the delay and the motive.

Make contracts visible at the point of need. A requisitioner searching for an item should see the contracted supplier and price automatically, not have to know it exists.

Create a fast emergency lane with its own approval, so urgency doesn’t require circumvention. Track its usage — if it becomes the main route, the standard process is too slow.

Involve users in category sourcing. Contracts negotiated without the people who use the items produce items people won’t use.

Then Measure

Track the share of spend on contract by category. Categories with low compliance point at either an unfit contract or an unfit process, and the split between those two is worth knowing.

Also track spend with suppliers who have no contract at all. Recurring purchases from an uncontracted supplier are usually a sourcing gap rather than a compliance one — somebody found a supplier that works and procurement never formalised it.

Handled that way, the exercise finds contracts worth negotiating rather than people worth reprimanding, which is both more accurate and considerably more effective. It also tends to surface a few categories nobody had realised were significant, simply because the spend was scattered across dozens of small transactions and never aggregated.

ticktick.ai surfaces contracted suppliers and prices at requisition, and reports off-contract spend by category with the requisition reasons attached.