A purchasing manager at a mechanical contractor pulled twelve months of invoices and did something none of her predecessors had bothered to do. She sorted them by supplier. The count came back at 214 suppliers for $6.8 million of annual spend, and only 31 of them had a contract.
She wasn’t surprised that people bought from lots of places. She was surprised by the pattern. The extra suppliers weren’t cheaper — on average they ran 14% more expensive than the ones already under agreement.
Nobody rebels. They just get stuck.
Maverick buying gets described as people ignoring the rules. In practice it’s people solving a problem at 6 am with no better option.
- The approved fastener supplier has a $250 minimum, and a tech needs $40 of bolts. So he drives to the hardware store.
- The parts counter closed at 5 pm, and the job ran until 9.
- The preferred glove vendor was out of stock, and the crew needed gloves that morning, not Thursday.
Every one of those purchases made sense in the moment. Multiply it across 40 trucks and 240 working days and you get $310,000 of spend that nobody negotiated, compared, or tracked.
Three questions before anyone adds a supplier
They didn’t ban new suppliers. They made the decision visible instead.
- Is this need already covered by an existing supplier? If yes, call that supplier first, every time, even for small orders.
- What’s the annual value of this category? Above $25,000 company-wide, it goes to a bid. Below that, it goes on a list reviewed quarterly.
- Who benefits, and what does it cost them to comply? Fix the minimum order, the pickup hours, or the stock level so the approved path is also the easy path.
That third question is the one most teams skip, which is why their policies get quietly ignored. It’s the pattern ERP Consulting teams see over and over: tighten the supply base and you get compliance for a month. Fix the reason people were going around it and you get it for good.
What the first 90 days actually returned
They consolidated to 61 suppliers, renegotiated three categories, and kept a short approved list for emergencies. Hard savings in year one came to $340,000, mostly from rebates and better pricing on the big categories.
The technician side got easier too. The preferred supplier opened a pickup counter until 8 pm and dropped the minimum to $75. Nobody has to be told to use it, because it’s simply faster than driving across town.
The finance director now runs that one-page supplier list every quarter, a habit she picked up during an ERP Consulting review and kept long after the project closed.
Pull your own top 30 suppliers by invoice count this week. If the names near the bottom are ones your leadership wouldn’t recognize, you’ve found your next 90 days of work.