Summary
Guided buying has become a strategic lever for procurement departments looking to reduce maverick spend in their indirect spending. By directing every employee towards pre-approved catalogues and preferred suppliers, it secures a procurement policy without adding complexity to processes. This article is aimed at Purchasing Directors and Managing Directors seeking to quantify the impact of off-contract purchases, understand the mechanisms behind user adoption, and build a measurable governance framework.
What this article covers:
- Definition and strategic positioning of guided buying;
- The real cost of maverick spend in indirect spend;
- The role of user experience in compliance;
- Regulatory governance challenges;
- Accessible deployment conditions;
- KPIs to convince your executive committee.
Contents:
- Guided buying: definition and challenges for procurement decision-makers
- Supplies, PPE and MRO: why indirect spend is fertile ground for maverick spend
- How does guided buying reduce off-contract purchases through the user experience?
- Guided buying and regulatory compliance: a governance tool
- Implementing guided buying: an accessible approach
- Measuring the ROI of guided buying: the key KPIs to convince your executive committee
In most organisations, a significant share of indirect spend on goods (supplies, personal protective equipment (PPE), maintenance parts) escapes the contracts negotiated by the procurement department. This phenomenon, known as maverick spend, silently erodes procurement savings and exposes the business to regulatory and supplier risks that are often underestimated.
Guided buying has emerged as a structural response to this challenge. Its effectiveness rests as much on technology as on human adoption: directing employees towards compliant catalogues is not enough if the user experience remains austere or complex.
Guided buying: definition and challenges for procurement decision-makers
Guided buying is not simply an online catalogue. It forms a layer of guidance built into existing procurement solutions, channelling every request towards the suppliers and products validated by the procurement department. Understanding what it is (and what sets it apart from conventional solutions) is the first step towards measuring its real value.
What is guided buying?
Guided buying is a system that directs an organisation's employees towards pre-approved catalogues, preferred suppliers and approval workflows aligned with procurement policies. It integrates with e-procurement software or an ERP system and covers the four main types of procurement: direct, indirect, services and capital purchasing. In practice, it primarily acts on the indirect procurement processes, where the risk of drift is highest.
Guided buying vs traditional e-procurement: what's the difference?
A standard online catalogue or ERP simply makes products available. Guided buying gives an additional layer of intelligence: business rules, compliance filters, and suggestions tailored to the buyer's profile. The compliant purchase becomes the natural path, with no added friction for the requester. It is this shift from an imposed catalogue to a chosen journey that turns adoption from an IT challenge into a competitive advantage: an employee who intuitively finds what they need has no reason to look elsewhere. SAP Ariba Buying and Invoicing is one of the best-known implementations, but it is not the only route available. This approach applies particularly to indirect spend: supplies, PPE, MRO, office or warehouse equipment.
Supplies, PPE and MRO: why indirect spend is fertile ground for maverick spend
Before deploying a solution, the problem must be measured. Maverick spend generates direct extra costs and systemic risks that most procurement departments struggle to quantify precisely, due to a lack of visibility over their indirect spend. This phenomenon is largely explained by the complexity of internal purchasing processes. Maverick spend proliferates precisely where employees perceive official channels as obstacles.
“The other risk is that these processes become so complex, outdated or time-consuming that, over time, internal customers start to bypass them. This is how maverick spend develops, a real scourge for procurement departments. Long tail spend accounts for an average of 60% of order volume, but 75% of the number of suppliers and 85% of the number of items within procurement departments.”
— Aurélie Wendling (European Key Account Manager 2022–2024, Manutan), 17 January 2023, Webinar: Long tail, indirect, maverick spend… understanding them better to optimise them, Manutan.
Indirect procurement structurally concentrates this risk of drift. The multiplicity of requesters, the frequency of urgent orders and the procurement department's limited visibility over these categories create fertile ground for circumvention. Contract management becomes impossible when purchase orders are issued outside the preferred supplier's scope. Supplier selection is short-circuited, traceability is absent, and any audit exercise becomes a laborious task. The risks are financial (unnegotiated prices, duplicate suppliers), regulatory, and governance-related.
How does guided buying reduce off-contract purchases through the user experience?
Reducing maverick spend is not just a matter of stricter rules. Research into organisational behaviour shows it clearly: an employee bypasses a purchasing process not out of bad faith, but because the compliant alternative is perceived as more complex than buying directly. Guided buying reverses this dynamic by making the compliant path simpler than the workaround. In other words: the best procurement policy is the one your employees follow without even realising it, because the experience it offers is better than the alternative.
Why do employees bypass procurement tools?
Off-contract purchases are rarely the result of a deliberate intention to break the rules. In the vast majority of cases, they stem from perceived friction: the official process is seen as too slow, too complex, or unsuited to the urgency of the need. When a warehouse operator urgently needs PPE, they choose the fastest solution, not the most compliant one. When a site manager cannot find the product, they need within a few clicks, they step outside the approved scope. This is not a procurement culture problem; it is a journey design problem.
Adoption of a procurement tool cannot be mandated; it is built through experience. A guided buying portal that reproduces the complexity of internal processes will simply move the problem elsewhere. Conversely, an intuitive interface, with effective search, relevant suggestions and transparent workflows, turns compliance into a natural reflex.
Pre-approved catalogues and workflows: guiding without constraining
Guided buying works on a simple principle: narrowing the visible scope without removing the sense of freedom. Catalogues display only the products approved by the procurement department. Approval workflows are triggered automatically depending on the amount or product category. The requester browses freely, but within a space that is fully compliant with procurement policies. A P2P solution provides the most suitable technical infrastructure for rolling out these mechanisms smoothly.
Why an intuitive UX is the biggest lever for adoption
Studies conducted in a European B2B context show that the adoption rate of a guided buying portal is directly correlated with the quality of its user experience. When the interface is as smooth as a consumer website, employees have no reason to look for an alternative outside the approved scope. UX thus becomes the primary lever for adoption. Change management nonetheless remains an essential condition for success: without supporting operational teams, even the best platform struggles to achieve lasting compliance rates.
Guided buying and regulatory compliance: a governance tool
Beyond expenditure control, guided buying meets a growing requirement for regulatory traceability. For senior management, it serves as a tool for managing legal risk as much as a lever for operational steering.
Due diligence, CSRD and anti-corruption: what guided buying is changing for your compliance
The European Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) and the CSRD on non-financial reporting require organisations to demonstrate the traceability of their purchases and the compliance of their suppliers. These requirements make off-contract purchases structurally problematic: a supplier who is not on the preferred list is a supplier who has not been audited.
Both directives have, however, undergone recent changes that narrow their scope and push back their deadlines. For mid-sized companies not immediately affected, getting ahead on purchase traceability remains a relevant governance approach: large groups within scope tend to gradually pass these requirements down to their suppliers and subcontractors.
On the anti-corruption front, the UK Bribery Act, the Swiss Criminal Code and Norway's General Civil Penal Code govern corrupt practices in business relationships. Guided buying helps reduce areas of opacity in supplier relationships, in line with the spirit of this legislation.
Guided buying mechanically reduces exposure to these risks by limiting purchases to preferred suppliers who are audited and compliant with the organisation's procurement policies.
Spend traceability and audit: guided buying as a governance tool
Every order placed through a guided buying portal is time-stamped and linked to an identified user, a preferred supplier and an active contract. This complete audit trail is a decisive asset during an internal control, an external audit or a due diligence exercise as part of an M&A transaction. For senior management, real-time expenditure management becomes possible: steering by category, consolidation of the supplier panel, and early detection of drift.
Implementing guided buying: an accessible approach
Deploying a guided buying system is often seen as something reserved for large companies with a sophisticated ERP. This perception slows adoption in many mid-sized companies. Yet the organisational and technical prerequisites are accessible as soon as the procurement department has a structured contractual base.
The prerequisites for deploying a guided buying approach
The success of a guided buying experience rests on several foundations, accessible to any organisation that commits to it with method. Procurement digitalisation is one of the enabling conditions. The concrete prerequisites are as follows:
- A formalised procurement policy shared with operational teams;
- A panel of preferred suppliers with active, well-maintained framework agreements;
- Structured product catalogues that are up to date and technically integrable;
- Sponsorship from senior management to embed compliance into the organisation's culture.
- Attention to user experience from the design stage: testing the buying journey with real operational users before deployment drastically reduces drop-off rates and post-launch workarounds.
- User journey testing before deployment: involving a representative panel of employees (operators, site managers, field buyers) in a pilot phase helps identify friction points before they become workaround habits. A journey validated under real conditions is the best guarantee of a lasting adoption rate.
These elements are within reach for mid-sized companies and large groups alike. Governance takes precedence over technological sophistication.
Structured supplier catalogues and PunchOut integration: the basis of guided buying without complex ERP
At the heart of guided buying lies a structured supplier catalogue (products, negotiated prices, contractual terms) and lightweight integration mechanisms. A PunchOut connection makes it possible to link a supplier's site directly to the internal ordering system, without a heavy ERP rollout. SAP Ariba is one implementation among others: it is not the only route to effective guided buying. Lighter solutions can achieve a high level of compliance with a controlled technical investment.
E-procurement integration: a supported rollout
Manutan supports ERP and e-procurement integrations to quickly connect its catalogues to its customers' internal ordering systems. Training included and dedicated support: guided buying becomes operational without tying up IT teams for months. This service is available in Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Slovakia, Spain, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and Portugal, as of the content publication date.
Measuring the ROI of guided buying: the key KPIs to convince your executive committee
Deploying a guided buying system is a strategic decision that must be justifiable in figures. Expenditure management can only convince an executive committee when it is backed by precise indicators that are measurable from the first weeks of deployment.
Contract compliance rate, savings achieved, supplier panel reduction: the 4 priority KPIs
Four indicators structure the dashboard for a guided buying project:
- User adoption rate: the share of employees who placed at least one order through the guided portal during the period, measured against the target population. This is the KPI to monitor first: a high compliance rate among a small number of active users masks an underlying adoption problem. If the right buyers are not in the system, every other indicator is skewed.
- Contract compliance rate: the share of purchases made through the guided portal out of total orders for the period (measurable from the first month of deployment). A compliance rate that stalls below 70% is often a sign of an adoption problem rather than a policy problem: it is the UX that should be audited first, before tightening the rules.
- Cost savings achieved vs off-contract purchases: the price difference observed between guided purchases and maverick spend on the same product (a direct lever for cost reduction);
- Reduction in the number of active suppliers: an indicator of panel consolidation and stronger negotiating power, calculable on a quarterly basis.
These three KPIs make it possible to quantify the guided buying process over time and feed credible reporting to the executive committee.
From measurement to management: integrating guided buying into your procurement dashboard
These indicators fit naturally into an existing procurement dashboard. Integrating them requires no additional tool: the guided buying platform generates the data and the procurement department structures and presents it. The limiting factor is not technical. Without sponsorship from senior management, compliance rates plateau: employees revert to old habits as soon as the pressure eases. Guided buying is not an IT project; it is the backbone of a responsible, measurable procurement strategy over the long term.
Guided buying does not succeed because it enforces compliance; it succeeds because it makes the right behaviour simpler than the workaround. This shift in effort, away from the rule and towards the experience, is what distinguishes deployments that last from those that run out of steam after a few months.
