An online eProcurement portal can make a big difference.  It provides a single place for all your buyers to go, allowing you to focus, direct and track your spend.  Tracking allows you to follow-up on off-contract buying to see if it serves a legitimate business need or, if it’s an area where more control is needed. 

However, absolute top-down control over the buying decisions is not the goal. After all, the reason these organizations have a distributed buying model is presumably because there is a compelling business need for local purchasing decisions; typically to react to local micro-market conditions.   The goal is to strike the right balance between local and centralized control. 

The eProcurement software should provide ways for you to dial up or down the level of autonomy provided to local buyers.  To be effective these settings need to be granular.  Perhaps some categories of spend are highly standardized so you’ll want to control those at corporate and clamp down the eProcurement configuration accordingly.  Other categories may require more local autonomy in the selection of products, or the use of local suppliers, so this flexibility is configured in.  Perhaps the “autonomy-factor” is not by category but by location, or region, brand or user groups within locations.  The software needs a cost-effective way to model these drivers for your business so it can provide the right balance between central and local control. 

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