In Part 1 of this series, we asked the question “→ How Do You Handle Internal Stakeholders Who Bypass Procurement?” in which we explored relationships vs governance.
Yes, process and governance are critical.
But when enforcement is your primary value proposition, you’ve created the very problem you set out to solve.
Often it seems that the tighter Procurement grips the process, the harder people work to get around it.
They’re doing it because, from where they sit, your process is the obstacle between them and delivering for their customers or their deadline.
The question isn’t whether your policies are correct. They probably are. The question is whether your approach to enforcing them is generating the compliance you need … or generating the workarounds you’re trying to prevent.
Every procurement leader has lived this tension.
You implement a policy because the business needs it.
You enforce it because accountability matters.
And somewhere along the way, enforcement becomes the identity of the function.
Stakeholders stop seeing procurement as the team that helps them buy smarter, and start seeing you as the team that slows them down.
Stakeholders stop seeing procurement as the team that helps them buy smarter, and start seeing you as the team that slows them down.
That’s when procurement loses its strategic seat.
Not because the process failed, but because the process became more important than the relationships that make it work.
If that tension sounds familiar, these five warning signs will help you pinpoint where it’s showing up … and what to do about it.
1. “No PO, No Pay”: Great Policy, Poor Experience
What it looks like
A stakeholder verbally committed to a supplier, the work was completed, invoices were submitted. But there’s no PO, so you block payment. The supplier is furious. They escalate to your CEO. The stakeholder blames you for “not being flexible.” The invoice eventually gets paid, but the damage is done.
Why it happens
“No PO, no pay” is correct policy. You’re not wrong to enforce it. But enforcement without education, or without a rapid resolution path, creates collateral damage.
What it costs you
- Supplier refuses to work with your company again
- Stakeholder learns “procurement creates problems” and works harder to bypass you next time
- You get blamed for fixing a problem someone else created
- Your leadership sees you as the blocker, not the solution
How to fix it
Distinguish between enforcement (which you must do) and problem-solving (which you should also do).
The tactical fix for a single incident is straightforward: create an emergency PO, pay the supplier, have the conversation. But the real question is: why does this keep happening?
The principle-based fix is to design a system that prevents it:
Create an emergency PO pathway. A pre-approved, streamlined process for situations where work has been committed without a PO. You hope people don’t need it, but when they do, it needs to work immediately. Define who can trigger it, what documentation is required after the fact, and what the post-incident review looks like.
Make the right path the easiest path. If raising a PO takes longer than committing verbally to a supplier, people will keep committing verbally. Audit the PO creation process itself, can it be done in under five minutes for standard requests? If not, that’s your root cause.
Educate at the point of need, not after the breach. Run short, targeted sessions with the departments where this happens most. Not “procurement training“, reframe it as “how to get your suppliers paid faster.”
When unauthorised spend does happen, address it in three phases:
- Immediate: Activate the emergency PO pathway so the supplier gets paid without delay
- Next day: Documented conversation with the stakeholder, coaching, not punishment, about why this can’t happen again
- Next week: Root cause analysis. Why was it so hard to get a PO in the first place? Fix the system, not just the symptom
The message: “We’ll fix this now, but we need to prevent it happening again. Here’s how.”
2. Every Policy Violation Gets the Same Escalation
What it looks like
Someone broke a procurement rule, so you escalate. Consistently. Every time. It’s in the policy. Your executive team’s inbox is now full of procurement escalations about vendor onboarding delays, missing documentation, and approval threshold breaches.
Eventually, they stop reading them.
Why it happens
You believe consistency is critical to enforcement. And it is. But when everything is treated as equally important, nothing is.
What it costs you
- Leadership develops escalation fatigue
- When you escalate something genuinely serious, it gets lost in the noise
- You’re seen as crying wolf
- Real issues don’t get the attention they deserve
How to fix it
Most procurement functions already have some version of Tier 1/2/3 escalation. The problem isn’t the tiers, it’s what you’re escalating and how. In large enterprises and government organisations, the issue is often structural, not procedural:
Escalations without narrative are noise. Don’t escalate individual incidents, escalate patterns with a story. Instead of “Department X missed a PO again,” try “Department X has had 14 PO misses in 6 months, concentrated in their project delivery team, which correlates with their onboarding of 8 new contractors. Here’s a proposed fix.” Leaders act on insight, not alerts. See “Design to Decision: Turning Procurement Dashboards into Executive Storytellers.”
Build an escalation dashboard, not an escalation email. Move from reactive escalation (flagging individual problems) to proactive visibility (a live dashboard showing compliance trends by department). When executives can see the data themselves, you don’t need to escalate, they come to you.
Create an “escalation budget.” Limit yourself to no more than two executive escalations per quarter. This forces discipline, you’ll only bring forward the issues that genuinely need executive intervention, and when you do, they’ll listen.
Pair every escalation with a recommendation. Never escalate a problem without a proposed solution. Executives don’t want to adjudicate procurement disputes, they want to approve a fix and move on.
Reserve executive escalation for issues that actually need executive intervention. For everything else: document, coach, monitor patterns. If a minor issue happens three times, that becomes an escalation about the pattern, not three separate incidents.
3. Every Purchase Request Gets the Same Treatment, Regardless of Urgency
What it looks like
Every purchase requisition goes through the same approval workflow. Doesn’t matter if it’s a $200 software subscription or a $200k enterprise contract. Doesn’t matter if the deadline is three months away or three days. Fair is fair. Everyone gets the same treatment.
Why it happens
You’ve been burned before by “urgent” requests that turned out to be poor planning. You’re trying to prevent stakeholders from weaponising urgency. And you’re right to be sceptical.
What it costs you
- Genuinely urgent requests (client deliverables, compliance deadlines, safety issues) get stuck in the same queue as routine purchases
- Stakeholders learn to lie about urgency because the process doesn’t differentiate
- When something actually is time-critical, you have no mechanism to fast-track it
- You lose credibility for being unable to move quickly when it matters
How to fix it
Create a documented fast-track process for genuine urgency. Plenty of organisations have redesigned their approval workflows so that routine purchases can be approved in hours while maintaining 98% budget compliance. The key wasn’t removing controls, it was routing different types of spend through different pathways based on risk and value.
Criteria for fast-track:
- Client deliverable with contractual penalty
- Regulatory/compliance deadline
- Health and safety issue
- Signed executive authorisation
Fast-track process:
- 4-hour SLA for initial review
- Compressed approval chain (skip non-essential steps, not control steps)
- Post-completion audit to verify urgency was genuine
Consequence for abuse:
- First abuse: Warning + future requests go through standard track
- Second abuse: Department loses fast-track privileges for 6 months
Now you can respond to genuine urgency without rewarding poor planning.
Dealing with stakeholders who weaponise urgency? That’s one of the 11 archetypes we break down in our tactical guide: Maverick Spend Management: A Tactical Guide to 11 Stakeholder Archetypes
4. High Procurement Compliance Doesn’t Equal Stakeholder Respect
What it looks like
Your procurement compliance rate is 87%. People are following the process. You report this as success. But when you ask stakeholders how they feel about working with procurement, the feedback is… lukewarm. They follow the process because they have to, not because they see value in it.
Why it happens
You’ve conflated adherence with adoption. People can comply without believing the process helps them.
What it costs you
- Stakeholders follow the letter of the policy while violating its spirit
- Minimal engagement, they tell you what you need to hear, not what you need to know
- No proactive collaboration or early involvement
- The moment policy enforcement slips, compliance collapses
How to fix it
Measure stakeholder perception alongside compliance. Run a quarterly stakeholder survey. Here are a few example questions:
- How easy is it to work with procurement? (1–10)
- Does procurement add value to your projects? (Yes/Sometimes/No)
- Would you recommend involving procurement early? (Yes/No/Depends)
- What’s one thing we should keep doing?
- What’s one thing we should change?
Track this alongside your compliance metrics. If compliance is 90% but satisfaction is 4/10, you have a problem.
Want to get this right? Stakeholder perception surveys are a core component of the Comprara Procurement Maturity Assessment. We design the survey, run it independently, and benchmark your results against industry peers, so you get honest feedback, not filtered responses. → Learn more about the Procurement Maturity Assessment
Target state: High compliance and high satisfaction. That’s the only combination that lasts.
5. Your Procurement Metrics Measure Control, Not Adoption
What it looks like
Your dashboard shows contract coverage at 78%, spend under management at 82%, policy adherence at 85%, and average savings per sourcing event at 12%. Looks great.
But none of these metrics measure whether stakeholders are coming to you early, recommending procurement to their colleagues, or seeing you as a partner rather than a tollbooth.
Why it happens
Control metrics are easier to measure than relationship metrics. And when procurement is under pressure to demonstrate value, hard numbers feel more defensible than something like “trust.”
What it costs you
- You’re optimising for metrics that don’t predict long-term success
- Stakeholders find creative ways to bypass you while technically staying compliant
- You miss early warning signs of dysfunction
- Your “success” is fragile, remove the enforcement, and the metrics collapse
How to fix it
Add leading indicators to your dashboard:
Relationship metrics:
- % of projects where procurement was involved in initial planning (not just execution)
- Average time from stakeholder request to procurement response
- Stakeholder NPS: “Would you recommend involving procurement early?”
- Repeat engagement rate: Do stakeholders come back to you for subsequent projects?
Target: If 85% of spend is under management, but only 40% of projects involve procurement from the start, your 85% is misleading. People are bringing you in after decisions are made. Aim for both: high control metrics and high early engagement.
The dashboard itself matters too. If your procurement reporting isn’t telling a clear story to the executive team, the metrics won’t drive action regardless of what you measure. For a deeper look at how to turn procurement data into executive-level narrative, this piece on turning procurement dashboards into executive storytellers is worth a read.
What to Do Next
If you recognised your team in these five warning signs, your next priority is building relationships. Not to become a pushover, but to make your good process something people actually want to follow.
Immediate actions:
- Spend time understanding stakeholder priorities (not just procurement needs)
- Create fast-track pathways for genuine urgency
- Measure stakeholder satisfaction alongside compliance rates
- Find ways to say “yes” within the policy framework
Ready to go deeper?
Contact Comprara for a comprehensive Procurement Maturity Assessment.
Knowing you have a problem is useful. Knowing exactly which problem, and having a data-backed roadmap to fix it, is what gets procurement taken seriously at the executive level.
