Procurement teams should rehearse the incident where an agent keeps buying after the contract behind it has ended. Run it as a 90-minute tabletop: the category manager pauses the ordering agent to draft-only, escalates to the head of procurement, lists every affected order from the record, contacts suppliers with one voice, and reports the exposure to finance and audit.
What does a procurement drill rehearse, and who owns it?
Procurement agents usually do three jobs. They raise call-off orders against framework or catalogue contracts at depth 3, within the business's own limits. They draft requisitions for anything off-contract at depth 2, for a buyer to approve. And they read supplier due diligence records at depth 1 to flag gaps. Buyers and category managers decide everything that is held.
What sets procurement apart is that an order is a commitment to a third party before any money moves. A wrong payment can sometimes be recovered; a wrong order may already be on a lorry. Unwinding it needs the supplier's cooperation, and how the team asks matters for the relationship.
The head of procurement owns the drill. A senior buyer facilitates and holds the scenario cards. Category managers, two or three buyers, the contract owner for the affected category and someone from accounts payable take part. A finance contact joins for the last twenty minutes. If the format is new to the team, start with what an incident drill is.
The scenario
Tuesday, 10:00. The accounts payable lead calls a buyer: a run of invoices for facilities supplies is being held. The prices on them trace back to a supplier price file that arrived by email, which makes the price an external claim, and an external claim cannot authorise a payment.
As the drill unfolds, the cards reveal the rest. The framework agreement for the category expired at the end of last month. The contract register was updated on time, but the agent's brief named the emailed price file, not the register, as its source of prices. Over three weeks the agent raised 60 orders worth about 90,000 in total, each inside its per-order limit of 5,000. Two suppliers have delivered. The rest are pending.
The drill step by step
- Person (facilitator): reads the scenario and starts the clock. Hand the buyer the held-invoice list and nothing else.
- Person (buyer): escalates to the category manager through the agreed incident route, not a chat message that nobody files.
- Person (category manager): pauses the ordering agent to draft-only. From this moment the agent works at depth 2: every new order is drafted and held for a buyer, and each verdict names the business's own limits as the bound that decided.
- Person (category manager): escalates to the head of procurement and the contract owner, and asks one scoping question: does any other category take prices from an emailed file?
- Agent, depth 1: lists every order raised since the contract expired, with the source stamp on each price. Person (buyer): checks the list against the contract register before anyone relies on it.
- Person (buyers): contact suppliers on pending orders to hold or cancel, using one agreed script. Delivered goods are reconciled, not returned by reflex.
- Person (accounts payable lead): confirms no affected invoice has been paid and keeps them held until procurement decides.
- Person (head of procurement): records the decisions and reports to finance (commitments are overstated), to internal audit, and to whoever owns procurement compliance.
- Person (facilitator): runs the debrief, ending with the bound and source changes the team will request.
| Step | The agent does | Depth | Stays with a person |
|---|---|---|---|
| Alert | Has raised orders on a bad source | 3 | Noticing the held invoices |
| Pause | Drafts every order for approval | Dropped to 2 | Deciding to pause |
| Scope | Lists orders and price sources | 1 | Checking against the register |
| Suppliers | Drafts hold and cancel requests | 2 | Calls, agreements, relationships |
| Payables | Nothing | 2 | Keeping invoices held |
| Report | Nothing | 2 | Reporting and restart decision |
What is distinctive about a procurement incident?
Every order was inside its limit. Sixty orders of under 5,000 to the same few suppliers is the pattern a buyer would call split ordering if a person did it. The drill should teach the team to watch cumulative spend per supplier per contract, not just per-order limits, and to ask for that as a bound.
Provenance did its job downstream and failed upstream. Payables held the invoices because the price was external. Procurement raised the orders because nothing in the ordering bounds asked where a price came from. The fix is a source rule: prices come only from the contract register, which is sealed by the system of record, and an order against a contract past its end date is refused.
Restarting needs more than a fixed brief. Once the brief and sources change, the agent should be replayed in Attest on the team's own past orders before depth 3 comes back. Until then it stays at draft.
Which controls does the drill test, and what evidence do they leave?
The pause. Evidence: the change to the business's own limits in the append-only record, with the category manager's name and the time.
Scoping. Evidence: the list of orders with the source stamp on each price, and the buyer's check against the register.
Supplier contact. Evidence: each hold or cancellation request and the supplier's reply, filed against the order.
Payment hold. Evidence: the held verdicts in payables, each naming the provenance bound.
Restart. Evidence: the new bounds, the person who approved them, and the agent's new certificate.
What should the head of procurement measure?
- Time from the first held invoice to the pause.
- Number and value of orders raised after the contract expired and before the pause.
- How many pending orders were stopped before delivery.
- Whether suppliers heard from one person or from several.
- Time to restore depth 3 with a new certificate, not just a fixed brief.
Where do procurement drills go wrong?
Treating it as a finance problem. Payables found it, but procurement owns the commitment. If the drill hands the incident to finance, the team learns nothing about its own bounds.
Every buyer emails every supplier. Suppliers receive three different messages and one of them promises payment. Agree the script and the single point of contact in the first half hour.
Restarting on a fixed brief alone. A changed source without a fresh certificate is a guess. Hold the agent at draft until it has been replayed and certified again.
The operations team drill rehearses the capacity problem when held queues swell, which procurement will feel at month end. Build your own cards with the AI agent incident drill script template, and see training teams for AI agents for where drills sit in a wider plan.
Where the Academy fits
Pryme Intelligence Academy's Operator track covers this incident from both ends: a module on keeping knowledge current, which is where stale and external sources are taught, and a module on when something goes wrong, which covers pausing, scoping and reporting. Buyers who approve held orders every day are the people the Operator certificate is built for.
Questions people ask
Should suppliers be told an agent raised the orders?
Tell them the orders were raised in error against an expired contract. Whether a person or an agent raised them matters less to the supplier than a clear request and a named contact.
Can the agent cancel orders itself?
It can draft the cancellation. Sending it changes a commitment with a third party, so most teams keep that with a buyer, especially during an incident.
How often should procurement run this drill?
Twice a year, and again after any change to how prices or contracts reach the agent. Rotate the scenario between price sources, supplier changes and contract expiry.