Procurement

By Edward Haigh

In November of last year I chaired a round-table discussion about the state of consulting procurement. Around the table (which, for pedants, was actually an elongated oval) were about 12 procurement managers with responsibility for buying consulting in some of the largest private sector organisations in Europe.

Not much.

As I mentioned earlier in the week, we’ve spent the last few months talking to more than 400 senior executives who use consulting services on a regular basis.  Almost all work in big organisations most of which have preferred supplier lists which should – in theory – govern their choice of consultants.  In practice we found that preferred supplier lists matter when one or more of the following conditions apply:

• The project involves either a huge amount of work across multiple countries or using consultants to substitute for full-time employees.

Let’s start with what has been achieved.  Buying and selling consulting services is a vastly different process now to what it was ten years ago.  More rigorous, disciplined and transparent, this new approach has encouraged (or forced, depending on your perspective) consulting firms to put more effort into articulating their expertise and demonstrating their track record and to have a more joined-up attitude when dealing with the biggest organisations.  For some areas of consulting, the role of procurement is now widely accepted, if not always welcomed.  Large-scale, often cross-border technolo