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Hi {{FIRST_NAME|readers}},

Here's a thought that may reorganize how you see your whole supplier catalog program:

You don't run a procurement catalog. You run a store.

A bad one, probably... (Sorry, most are.)

Nine supplier punch-outs stacked in a list on the requisition isn't a storefront. It's nine storefronts, each with its own door, its own search bar, and its own checkout, and we've asked every employee to shop all nine of them to find one laptop dock.

Amazon worked out decades ago that every extra click costs a customer. Procurement mostly hasn't. So our people do the rational thing: they vote with their clicks and shop somewhere easier.

Tonight we make the case that fixing catalog adoption isn't a training problem or a policy problem. It's a retail problem. And the teams that win treat it like one.

Onwards!

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Most teams treat the catalog like plumbing. World-class teams treat it like a storefront.

Somewhere in your company right now, someone needs a laptop dock.

They open a requisition in your purchasing system (if you’re lucky). They're greeted by a wall of tiles: nine supplier punch-out catalogs, each with a logo, none with a hint about which one carries what they need (or which one you've actually negotiated a price with).

They click into the first. New window. New search bar. New everything. They type "dock." They get 340 results, half of them for a different product entirely. They can't tell if it's the right one. They definitely can't tell whether it's cheaper than the dock sitting in punch-out number four (which they'd have to back all the way out and re-enter to check).

So they do what any reasonable human does.

They get discouraged, open Amazon in another tab and buy the dock in ninety seconds. (“I’ll figure out the admin later…”)

In most organizations, that purchase just disappeared. It won't show up as a catalog miss. It won't show up in any report you're looking at. You will never count it.

It’s just going to be in the big, messy “Amazon” spend bucket…

Catalog adoption sounds like the simplest KPI in procurement: the share of purchases that go through the catalog that should have... Easy.

Except to calculate it, you need the denominator: everything your people bought that could have been a catalog purchase. And most organizations do not have that number. Not even close.

Think about how many ways the same monitor can enter your company. Through a punch-out. Through a hosted catalog. Through a free-text requisition where someone just types "monitor" and a price. On a P-card at the electronics store down the road. Through Amazon Business. Bought personally and expensed after the fact. Invoiced straight to AP by a supplier who emailed a rep…

The worst part? That dock might already be sitting in inventory 😮

That's one product, and we just listed seven front doors. Each one lands on a different desk. Very hard to reconcile.

So the "adoption rate" most teams put on a slide is really catalog orders as a share of what already flowed through the procurement tool. It quietly excludes every purchase that bypassed the tool in the first place, which is exactly the spend you should be worried about.

Catalog adoption is a number that flatters itself by refusing to look at its own blind spot.

That’s a problem in most catalog programs: they are managing (or ignoring) a metric they cannot actually see. The true adoption rate is almost always worse than the dashboard claims, and nobody can prove it either way. Purchase fragmentation doesn't just cause the leakage. It hides it.

That's the real starting condition…

Here's what a "catalog program" looks like at most companies:

Procurement asks IT to connect a “punch-out catalog” with a supplier. IT sets it up. The punch-out appears in requisitions. Everyone moves on.

From that point forward, the catalog is treated like plumbing. It's "done." Nobody touches it again until a ticket comes in ("the ACME punch-out is throwing an error"), at which point someone fixes the pipe and goes back to sleep.

Or the neglect surfaces the slow, expensive way.

Eventually somebody on the category team slices the spend cube and the numbers look wrong. We're paying more for the same monitor than the contract says. Line items drifting above the negotiated rate. A catalog price that crept north sometime last year while nobody was watching.

Then comes the questions nobody in the room wants to own: when were these catalog prices last updated by the vendor? When did we last audit them?

Silence. Because "set and forget" cuts both ways. A catalog nobody maintains isn't just hard to shop. It's a price list quietly going stale while you keep paying against it, purchase order after purchase order.

There's a reason this happens, and it isn't incompetence.

Connecting a punch-out catalog is genuinely easy. It works on day one. You can demo it. It feels like you've shipped a catalog program.

That feeling (competence, achievement, "we've got this handled") is the first peak of the Dunning-Kruger curve. The technical setup is the part that requires the least expertise, so it's the part that gets done. And because it produces a working screen, it masquerades as the whole job.

The real work, the work that actually moves adoption, sits on the far side of the valley. Most catalog programs never make the trip. They stall at the peak, mistake "connected" for "world-class," and never notice how much is leaking out the sides (because, as we just covered, they can't see it).

If you want to squeeze the juice out of a catalog program, here's the shift you have to make:

Every high-adoption catalog program we've seen is run by someone who thinks like a store owner, not a systems admin. And store owners obsess over one thing procurement almost never measures:

Clicks to purchase.

How many steps does it take a human to go from "I need a thing" to "the thing is ordered"? On Amazon, it's roughly two. In a stack of nine punch-outs, it's however many clicks it takes to guess the right supplier, learn their interface, run a search, doubt the result, and quietly give up.

Guess which experience wins the requisition. (And remember: when yours loses, you probably won't even see where the purchase went.)

Once you put on the eCommerce hat, the problems with a pile of punch-outs become obvious:

This is what we call “death by punch-out”. Not one dramatic failure. A thousand small frictions, each one nudging a buyer toward the Amazon tab you'll never track.

So what does the far side of the valley actually look like? Here's the work that separates a world-class program from a set-and-forget one.

It's tempting to file all of this under "nice to have." It isn't… Not if you have any sort of significant catalog spend.

Adoption is not a vanity metric. Every purchase that doesn't run through your catalog doesn't vanish (even if your reporting says it did)… It reroutes to maverick channels, off-contract cards, and Amazon tabs, and it takes your negotiated pricing, your spend visibility, and your compliance with it. The cruel part is the loop we opened with: the same fragmentation that lets the spend leak is what stops you from sizing how much is leaking. You bleed, and you can't find the wound.

The gap between a mediocre catalog program and a world-class one isn't a training gap. It's the gap between a punch-out you connected and a storefront you built.

Stop asking "is the punch-out connected?"

Start asking two things instead. How many clicks does it take one of our people to buy the right thing at the right price? And if they don't, would we even know?

Count the clicks honestly. Sit with the second question longer. If the answers are embarrassing, you've just found your adoption problem.

And it was never the users.