eProcureAI / Resources / Playbook
PlaybookA catalog is the quietest control in procurement and the one most often loaded badly. Getting it right takes an afternoon and decides whether the rest of the rollout holds.
Nobody argues with a catalog. That is what makes it the most effective control most procurement teams have, and the one they usually set up last.
When the thing somebody needs is in the catalog at an agreed price, buying correctly is faster than any alternative. When it is not, they learn the catalog is unreliable and stop checking it, which quietly undoes everything else.
A catalog is judged by users on a single question. Is what I need in here?
Get that right most of the time and people check first. Get it wrong repeatedly and they stop, because two failed searches teach them the answer faster than any training session.
The failure is self reinforcing. Once people stop checking, off catalog requests rise, which makes the catalog look less used, which makes it seem less worth investing in.
Do not survey people about what they need. Look at what they actually bought.
Take twelve months of purchases, sort by frequency rather than value, and start at the top. You are optimising for transaction count, because that is what removes queue volume and creates the habit.
Most organisations find that a modest number of items covers the majority of their request volume, because purchasing follows a long tail.
| Selection method | What it optimises for | Result |
|---|---|---|
| By frequency | Transaction count | Removes the most queue volume, builds the habit |
| By value | Spend covered | Impressive coverage, but people still cannot find everyday items |
| By asking people | What they remember needing | Incomplete, and biased toward recent frustrations |
| By category completeness | Tidiness | Slow, and delays launch for little benefit |
Frequency first is almost always right for a launch. Value based coverage can follow once the habit exists.
Most catalogs stop at physical goods, which leaves services as the messy half where free text descriptions and after the fact pricing survive.
Services belong in a catalog with a rate and a unit. An hourly rate for setup work, a daily rate for training, a per visit rate for maintenance. That turns a services request into a priced line rather than a paragraph somebody has to interpret and cost up later.
Add a short note on when to use each service. It sounds trivial until you watch somebody choose between two similar sounding options for the first time.
A catalog with stale prices is worse than none, because people trust it and are wrong.
The sustainable approach is to let suppliers submit their own price changes and have your team approve them with an effective date. That keeps pricing current without anybody maintaining a spreadsheet, and the effective date means a change lands when you agreed rather than immediately.
Requests already approved should keep the rate they were approved at. Otherwise a price change quietly rewrites history and nobody trusts the numbers.
Your off catalog requests are a list of exactly what is missing, compiled by the people who needed it.
Review them monthly at first. Anything appearing repeatedly should be added, and anything appearing once probably should not, because a catalog that tries to cover every eventuality becomes unusable.
This is also the honest measure of whether the catalog is working. A falling off catalog rate means it is covering what people need.
Launching with too little. The most common and most damaging, because the habit never forms.
Blocking off catalog purchases. Pushes spend onto personal cards, where you can see nothing at all. Route them for review instead.
No no approval threshold. If every catalog purchase still needs sign off, the catalog has saved nobody any time and adoption will not follow.
Nobody owning it. Catalogs decay without an owner, and the decay is invisible until the off catalog rate has already climbed.
Catalog depth is the strongest predictor of adoption.
Read it AnalysisOff contract buying is usually a catalog gap.
Read it GuideThe threshold that makes a catalog worth using.
Read itWe will import it live and raise a request against it so you can see the whole path.
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