Originally aired November 20, 2025 on Extropy On AIr.
From rogue spending to slow approvals and disconnected catalogs, procurement inefficiencies add up fast, and they touch every department and every dollar. In this episode of our Raindrop partner series, Kevin Zirkle of Extropy Advisors and Ward Karson, COO of Raindrop, talk about why people work around clunky purchasing systems, how guided buying and budget-aware requisitions make the right path the easy path, where AI helps, and why e-procurement is one of the fastest ways for CFOs to improve margin.
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Key takeaways
- People bypass procurement systems because they are painful, not because they are malicious. Complexity drives maverick spend.
- Guided buying, federated catalog search and budget-aware requisitions make compliance the easiest path.
- AI suggests preferred items and suppliers, catches duplicates, blocks POs to suppliers under review and flags off-contract buying.
- Engage the business early, review policies before go-live and measure adoption by behavior, not logins.
- Raindrop e-procurement works with existing ERPs, and better management of indirect spend can drive repeatable EBITDA gains.
Why do people work around procurement systems?
Ward says the biggest issue with legacy procurement systems is complexity. Systems are clunky, so users bypass them. That leads to maverick spend: shadow suppliers, off-contract buys and missed savings. Procurement loses visibility, finance loses control, and business users just want to get what they need and get back to work.
Kevin agrees that people don’t bypass process to be malicious. They bypass it because it is painful. When it takes 12 clicks to find a supplier or two weeks to get something approved, people find shortcuts. Ward shared a client that discovered it had 11 different contracts for the same office supplies, each negotiated separately by a different department. By consolidating and putting e-procurement rules in place in Raindrop, it saved 22% of that annual spend.
What does modern e-procurement include?
Raindrop focuses on simplicity, speed and compliance. Key capabilities include:
- Guided buying through one clean, modern interface.
- Federated search across buyer-managed and supplier-hosted catalogs, so users search once instead of hopping between catalogs.
- Punch-in with sites like Amazon Business, where users shop directly but approvals route through Raindrop under your business rules.
- Budget-aware requisitions that know how much budget is available.
- Approval routing by policy, role, amount and currency, so requests reach the right people at the right time.
- PO generation and three-way match support for goods.
- Real-time analytics for downstream spend visibility.
Most importantly, it is built for users, not just the procurement team. Kevin points out that adoption is where the ROI comes from.
How does guided buying work?
Ward compares it to online shopping tailored to your company. Users answer a few quick questions, like what they are buying, for which department and under what budget, and Raindrop guides them to the right catalog, supplier and policy. As Kevin puts it, if the system makes the right path easier than the wrong one, people take the right path, and compliance takes care of itself.
How do you keep purchases within budget?
One of finance’s most common frustrations is POs getting approved with no view of available budget. Raindrop builds budget visibility into the requisition itself. Users see their department’s available budget in real time, and the system can block or warn based on thresholds. Ward calls it preventive controls, not postmortem cleanup: spend discipline is enforced upstream instead of in reconciliation after the fact.
Where does AI help in e-procurement?
- Smart suggestions for preferred items, suppliers and contracts based on past purchases and policy.
- Duplicate detection that flags items already ordered or already in stock.
- Risk alerts that prevent new POs to a supplier under review.
- Compliance scoring that flags non-standard purchases or spend outside a negotiated agreement.
AI also recommends better choices, like an alternative item with better pricing or delivery terms, and flags purchases that don’t match the expected need or category. It is trained on the organization’s own data, including past transactions, supplier performance and user behavior, so it gets more useful over time. Ward says it empowers users while protecting the business.
What does it look like in practice?
One major Raindrop customer struggled with maverick spend. Employees often bought what they wanted on Amazon and expensed it. Raindrop worked with Amazon Business to set up a punch-in, so users could still shop there while approvals and payment ran through Raindrop and everything was captured.
Raindrop calls the experience its digital front door. A user asks Rain, Raindrop’s AI agent, for an item, and a universal search runs across all catalogs, including Amazon Business, CDW, Insight, McMaster-Carr, Grainger and others. If the item isn’t available, Rain walks the user through a spot-buy process with its own approval rules. The result: off-contract spend essentially eliminated and complete visibility into spend across the organization.
How do you drive adoption of e-procurement?
Ward shared two best practices:
- Engage the business early. Let users help design categories and workflows so the tool reflects how they work. That builds buy-in.
- Measure adoption by behavior, not logins. Are people buying through the system? Are they buying from preferred suppliers? That is what matters.
Kevin adds that when people feel a system was built with them and not just for them, they take ownership. Extropy also often finds that purchasing policies are outdated or inconsistent, so an e-procurement rollout is a chance to re-baseline who approves what, when and why. That is a governance question, not a software one. Ward recommends a quick policy review before go-live, because the best workflow engine in the world won’t fix unclear or outdated rules. Raindrop doesn’t force a rigid process. Clients define the policies that make sense for them, and Raindrop automates them.
Does e-procurement work with your existing ERP?
Short answer: yes. Raindrop integrates with SAP, Oracle, Workday, Microsoft and others. You can run e-procurement and generate the PO in Raindrop and send it to your ERP for invoice matching, or have Raindrop sit upstream to run intake and policy controls and push clean data downstream. For a client on Workday Financials, for example, Raindrop creates the requisition and PO and pushes it into Workday, and once the invoice is received and matched in Workday or Basware, the data flows back for full-cycle visibility. Clients get a modern purchasing experience without disrupting their finance backbone.
Why should CFOs prioritize e-procurement now?
Ward says every dollar of indirect spend is a chance to optimize. A strong e-procurement process enforces policy, supports supplier strategy, enhances budget control and gives finance visibility it has never had. Indirect spend may not be flashy, but it is often one of the fastest areas to improve margin. Managing even 10% of it better through compliance, volume discounts or fewer suppliers can unlock real EBITDA gains, and those gains repeat year after year.
In their words
It’s really preventative controls. It’s not postmortem cleanup.
Ward Karson, Raindrop
If the system makes the right path easier than the wrong one, people are going to take the right path.
Kevin Zirkle, Extropy Advisors
About the speakers
Kevin Zirkle is Director of Business Development at Extropy Advisors, where he works across Extropy’s partner ecosystem, matching organizations with the right technology and the right people to move transformation from the whiteboard into production.
Ward Karson is Chief Operating Officer at Raindrop, a spend management platform covering sourcing, contracts, supplier management, e-procurement and analytics.
FAQ
What causes maverick spend?
Most maverick spend comes from systems that are too hard to use, not from bad intent. When it takes 12 clicks to find a supplier or two weeks to get an approval, people find shortcuts, which leads to shadow suppliers, off-contract buying and missed savings.
What is guided buying in e-procurement?
Guided buying works like online shopping tailored to your company. Users answer a few quick questions, such as what they are buying, for which department and under what budget, and the system guides them to the right catalog, supplier and policy.
How does e-procurement improve budget control?
Budget visibility is built into the requisition, so users see their department’s available budget in real time and the system can block or warn based on thresholds. Spend discipline happens upstream, as a preventive control, instead of in reconciliation after the fact.
Can e-procurement work with my existing ERP?
Yes. Raindrop integrates with ERPs like SAP, Oracle, Workday and Microsoft. It can create the requisition and PO and send it to the ERP for invoice matching, or sit upstream to run intake and policy controls and push clean data downstream.
Why should CFOs prioritize e-procurement?
Every dollar of indirect spend is a chance to optimize. Strong e-procurement enforces policy, supports supplier strategy, tightens budget control and gives finance visibility it has never had. Managing even 10% of indirect spend better can unlock real EBITDA gains, year after year.
Keep exploring
- More from our partner series on Extropy On AIr
- Previous in the Raindrop series: Smarter Sourcing Starts Here: How Raindrop Cuts Cost Without Cutting Corners
- Next in the Raindrop series: Inside Raindrop: The Next Era of AI-Driven Procurement
- Why Extropy
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