A requisition system that handles a third of the organisation's purchasing controls a third of the organisation's purchasing. Every feature comparison is secondary to that number, and yet adoption is rarely the thing measured after implementation. The practical questions are what makes people use it, what makes them avoid it, and how you would know which is happening.
What drives people to use it
Speed, visibility and a short form. If a request is answered the same day, the requester can see where it is, and the form takes two minutes, people use it because it is easier than negotiating by email. Every additional field and every additional day of delay moves the balance towards the workaround.
What drives people around it
Delay, mostly. A card purchase that takes an hour will always beat an approval that takes three days for anything remotely urgent. After delay comes obscurity: a request that vanishes without acknowledgement teaches people that the system is unreliable, and that lesson is remembered much longer than a single slow approval.
How to measure adoption honestly
Compare invoices that arrive with a purchase order behind them against those that do not, month by month. That ratio is the real adoption figure and it is visible from payables data rather than from the requisition system, which by definition only knows about requests it received. A rising ratio is the only proof the control is spreading.
Questions people ask about purchasing requisition software
How do we increase adoption?
Reduce the elapsed time to a decision and make the status visible. Enforcement helps only once the process is fast enough to comply with.
Should we refuse invoices with no purchase order?
Many organisations do, returning them to the supplier. It is effective and it needs to be communicated to suppliers and to staff before it starts, or it simply generates angry phone calls.
What is a realistic target?
It depends on your spend mix, since some categories genuinely cannot be pre-ordered. Track the trend rather than a target borrowed from elsewhere.