Maverick Spend is a Superbug

Every time a stakeholder bypasses sourcing, a little damage is done - and my heart aches a bit.

Maybe it’s just a one-off. A quick purchase. A shortcut—like using your corporate card as if it were a vending machine with no consequences.

And every time it happens, I know exactly where this leads.

But when everyone does it—repeatedly—you’ve got a systemic problem.

It’s the procurement version of antibiotic resistance.

Antibiotic Resistance: A Global Cautionary Tale

Antibiotics were once miracle cures. Now, due to overuse, they’re losing effectiveness. Pathogens adapt faster than the treatments. The World Health Organization lists antimicrobial resistance as a top-10 global health threat.

How did we get here? Looking back it all looks very simple: overprescription, misuse and short-term fixes.

Isn’t it extremely familiar? Procurement faces the same pattern:

• Everyone overrides the process for convenience

• Rules are bent "just this once"

• Exceptions become norms

Eventually, the system stops working.

Maverick Spend = Procurement Resistance

Maverick spend refers to procurement activity that circumvents established sourcing channels, negotiated frameworks, or defined category strategies—essentially, spend that ignores the structure you’ve fought to build and optimize.

It’s not just annoying. It’s dangerous.

📊 Analysts widely estimate that maverick spend can represent up to 80% of transactions while delivering only 20% of actual procurement value. 

Deep dive into some alternative reading @ Veridion: 8 Must‑Know Statistics on Maverick Spend

This creates:

• Fragmented supplier relationships: business units sign their own contracts with the same vendor under different terms, making it impossible to leverage volume, align SLAs, or hold the supplier accountable when issues arise

• Missed volume discounts: negotiated tiered pricing thresholds aren’t met because spend is scattered, resulting in 10–15% higher unit costs

• Hidden risk exposure: non-compliant purchases introduce vendors that haven’t passed security, legal, or financial screening

• Siloed data and shadow IT: teams purchase tools or services that don’t integrate with central platforms, leaving gaps in reporting, license visibility, or even cybersecurity controls

• Diluted ESG and compliance programs: purchases made outside of approved vendors bypass sustainability or diversity standards, which erodes progress on corporate goals

Like bacteria adapting to antibiotics, teams adapt to working around procurement.

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Case Study: The Resistance Took Hold

A large European tech company negotiated a cloud services agreement with a major vendor. Procurement secured a 20% enterprise discount.

But various departments kept buying licenses directly with corporate cards.

• Noncompliant configurations

• Premium pricing

• Untracked usage

By Year 2:

• Spend was fragmented across 11 cost centers

• Usage exceeded contract caps

• The vendor refused to renew on preferential terms

The discount was lost. The vendor had the upper hand. Procurement had no data to challenge them.

How to Prevent Procurement Resistance

1. Establish Contract Guardrails

   • Make procurement involvement mandatory above a threshold— require procurement review for any spend over €5,000 or for purchases involving new suppliers, to ensure contract compliance and pricing integrity

   • Use intake management tools (e.g., Zip, Workday Intake, ServiceNow, Jira workflows)—because they simplify how stakeholders engage with procurement, reduce manual requests, and ensure routing, approvals, and compliance are consistent from the start

2. Create Real-Time Visibility

   • Monitor P-card and non-PO spend— use real-time dashboards to flag purchases made outside of contracted vendors or detect patterns of spend that bypass PO workflows

   • Tag purchases to categories and preferred suppliers— auto-classify P-card transactions using merchant codes and map them to active category strategies and contracted vendors

3. Enforce with Context

   • Educate on why process matters: risk, cost, leverage— show how bypassing preferred suppliers led to a failed audit or inflated pricing on similar purchases

   • Allow fast-lane sourcing for urgent needs—but with limits. Let business users process emergency orders under €1,000 within 24 hours using a pre-approved supplier list, but route anything above that to procurement with auto-alerts and a 48-hour SLA.

4. Run a Bypass Audit

   • Identify top departments and roles generating non-compliant spend— analyze P-card logs to see which teams frequently bypass contracts or exceed policy thresholds

   • Understand root causes: speed (e.g., users need faster turnaround than procurement offers), awareness (e.g., stakeholders don’t know a contract exists), or resistance (e.g., negative past experience with sourcing process)?

5. Design Procurement Like Product

   • If your process is clunky, people should work around it—think of 6-step intake forms for a €300 SaaS license or 10-day cycles for low-risk office equipment. They’re not resisting—they’re surviving.

   • UX is not a nice-to-have. It’s risk mitigation— a confusing intake form or unclear vendor policy leads directly to workarounds, policy breaches, or late-stage escalations that could’ve been avoided with a better-designed experience.

💡 Final Thought

Maverick spend is not a behavior problem. It’s a symptom of design failure.

If procurement wants to stay effective, we need to treat the disease—not punish the symptoms.

Like antibiotics, processes lose power when abused. Fix the resistance—or lose control.

✅ Up Next: 🎻 “Even Great Suppliers Sound Bad Without a Conductor: What Orchestras Teach Us About Governance”

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