In procurement, we often hear of efforts to eliminate rogue or maverick spend by employees who simply won’t budge on their purchasing processes. There are obvious problems with these purchasing rogues, including the failure to leverage purchasing power, little oversight, poor tracking, and labor intensive paper trail to process expenses. And with large dollar estimates of the cost to companies, it’s no wonder many of them go out of their way to curb the practice.

That being said, I don’t think I’ve heard a solution expressed as simply as the presentation by Chad Buchanan, VP of Strategic Procurement & Real Estate at Axcess Financials, at the Palo Alto Spend Management Day. Considering that Axcess Financials faces some immense hurdles that typical procurement departments would find extremely daunting - like an annual staff turnover rate over 100%, 1,400 retail locations, and a system rollout that skipped the pilot stage - understanding his success could prove to be very insightful. Chad’s advice:

First, give your employees a good process, that’s easy to learn and use. Not to underestimate the cognitive capacity of their workforce, but Chad says “you have to make this stupid simple.” Accomplish that, and Chad says you can rely on the ultimate training motivator…the desire to buy something. If an employee’s choice is to go without something or dive into a system that’s easy to use, most will opt for learning the new system. And to further nudge them towards that desired behavior, Chad has a second recommendation…

Remove their other options. It’s actually quite obvious when you think about it, but simply blocking websites that rogue employees use to purchase from will go a long way towards driving compliance.

Does Axcess Financial still have some employees running down to the local office supply store? Of course. In fact they expect some level of that just to cover emergencies. But according to Chad, they are very comfortable with their compliance rate…and the mavericks are no longer a problem.

Justin Fogarty is Managing Editor of Supply Excellence. For any questions or feedback on the blog or its contributors, Justin can be reached at jfogarty[at]ariba.com.