OK, so let's get the consultant joke out of the way, shall we? Nothing like a bit of self-deprecation on behalf of your authors. Here's one of our favorites:

A man in a hot air balloon descends over a meadow where a shepherd is tending his flock.

After the balloonist greets the man, he asks him, “If I tell you how many sheep you have without having to count them, will you give me one of them?”

The shepherd agrees.

The man in the balloon says, “You have 100 sheep.”

A bit surprised, the shepherd says, “How did you know?”

“Well,” says the man, “your field is about 5 km by 5 km, and in this part of the wilderness you can graze four sheep on each square km of land. So, 5×5 is 25 square km × 4 is 100 sheep.”

“Wow, you're right,” said the shepherd, “please take your pick of my sheep!”

After the man in the balloon selects his sheep, the shepherd turns to him and says, “If I tell you what you do for a living, will you give me my animal back?”

The man in the balloon agrees. The shepherd says, “You are a consultant.”

The man in the balloon is amazed at the insight that the shepherd has shown and says, “How on earth did you know I am a consultant?”

The shepherd answers, “You showed up here, fueled by nothing but hot air, even though nobody called you. You want to get paid for an answer I already knew, to a question I never asked. And you don't know a thing about my business…now give me back my dog!”

Love the ending there. But on a more serious note, we (the authors) do believe an insider's perspective would be helpful on the topic of Procurement, given how many Procurement transformation programs involve sizeable consulting support.

So, let's talk about how best to select the right type of partner, how to best use them, how to make sure you get value from their engagement, and what to do when it all goes wrong.

Unfortunately, we can't give away any commercial secrets along the way…we need to continue to work harmoniously with our colleagues!

Why Use Consultants?

There is an extremely wide spectrum from “good use of consultants” to “terrible use of consultants,” and we've all heard of examples of the latter…it really can go very wrong. But particularly, when it comes to Procurement, consultants can add—and accelerate—a huge amount of value. They just have to be used in the right way…using the right people to do the right job in the right way, while working effectively with your people in an integrated manner.

Our first example of a good use of Procurement consultants is in the “Opportunity Assessment” or “30-Day Plan” phase—to shape and size the program. Consultants are very good at some things and not very good at others. What they are very good at is quickly and accurately sizing and segmenting your spend, interviewing the organization to unearth the opportunities, and backing that up with compelling evidence and a clear plan for moving forward.

It's analytical, it involves large volumes of (spend) data, it's “outside looking in,” and the result is a structured plan. This is where consultants excel. What would take your people six months, good consultants can do in one, because they have the luxury of being able to focus on the task 100% without distraction. Plus, it's the first piece of work, so you can use it to test them and get to know them on a short analytical piece of work before you commit to something bigger.

This short analytical piece also gives them all the facts they need to provide you with a clear proposal to help with the execution. It also provides the consultants with the insights needed before embarking on any type of “fee at risk” commercial arrangement. So, using consultants for the initial, short, sharp diagnostic, makes eminent sense.

The second effective use of Procurement consultants lies in the area of sourcing execution, because it plays to the consultants' skill set. Sourcing requires the analytical, numeracy, communication, and influencing skills that consultants tend to have in abundance, and it requires large amounts of motivation and tenacity. Consultants just make for great interim or project-based sourcing execution resources; in many ways, they have exactly the skills that you wish your buyers had (I can't count the number of times CPOs have told me, “I wish I had people like yours.”).

The other reason for using consultants for sourcing and savings delivery has to do with timing. In a situation where you're transforming your Procurement team, there is some lag time due to ramp-up. It will take the CPO at least a year to get his new, high-performing team in place. Why do nothing during that year, when you could use consultants to start attacking the categories and generating savings? So, use the consultants to plug your resource gaps until your team is in place. In fact, most of the Procurement transformation consulting programs I've sold have essentially had the dual objective of (i) delivering significant savings, while (ii) building up the long-term capability…but doing them in parallel, rather than sequentially, which would involve losing a year.

Consultants are also a good way to “variabilize” your cost base. Procurement has peaks and troughs when it comes to resource requirements, so why not staff up permanently to the base load, then use consultants as and when required to top up. The biggest peak in Procurement activity occurs during the sourcing phase; once the spend is sourced, there is a much lower need for permanent Procurement resources. Another reason to use consultants early then—have them help you get through the sourcing activity for the first 18 months, then pull things back to a smaller in-house team.

A final area where it makes sense to bring in consultants is, of course, the whole topic of Procurement IT systems implementation. Here you need help with program management, process mapping, process design, platform customization, and implementation. These can be large consulting programs with significant over-runs in terms of both time and cost, and care must be taken around the promised benefits. The latter will be in the form of process efficiencies, which are comparatively small and difficult to bank; and in the form of compliance benefits; i.e., a mechanism to ensure that the spend flows to your chosen suppliers, who are assumed to have more attractive pricing. That will be true, but only after you've sourced your spend…the P2P system is an enabler of benefit, but it doesn't bring the benefit per se. Our advice when it comes to a P2P implementation project is, make sure you speak to a range of providers and experts, to build up a full picture of the potential pitfalls and the various available ways of avoiding them.

There is one final point regarding when to use consultants, and this concerns the skillsets that you're buying from them. I've spent 25 years pitching Procurement consulting programs. Over that period, by far the most common challenge or objection I've received has consistently been around category experience—to the point where it seems that many of our clients engaged us primarily because of our category experience. It would seem to be the most important criterion when choosing a Procurement consultant. And yet…looking at it from the other side, as a consultant who has spent a quarter of a century helping clients to source complex categories…it's actually not that important.

Sure, categories like IT and manufactured components, in particular, require subject matter expertise; but for most categories, other considerations are more important. In fact, when I'm looking to staff my teams, category knowledge comes very low on my list of priorities.

There are a number of reasons for this: (i) it's actually fairly easy to learn about a supply market and a category…it's an easy skills gap to plug; (ii) you, the client, already have the buyer who's been buying mid-range transformers (or whatever it may be) for 27 years; he / she will work with the consultant hand in hand…the deep supply market expertise can come from the client side—it's already there; (iii) often it's actually helpful to not know your category too well…it opens up new lines of questioning, whereas decades of experience can make one blinkered; and (iv) dealing with the suppliers is the easy part, because you have power/leverage over them. They will comply in the end, most likely, but the internal stakeholders may not…the bigger challenge lies in managing the change internally, which does not require category expertise.

The skills deficit that you have in Procurement is likely not around category knowledge…what you're more likely lacking is analytical horsepower, hard workers that go the extra mile, and those all-important influencing and communication skills. You'd be better served to probe those skills during the consultants' pitches…because that's where you need the help. So, rather than asking how many times a firm has sourced a certain category, try to understand in detail how their people speak to their experience in overcoming issues like lack of data and lack of business buy-in. That said, category experience is important, but it's a little more nuanced than that.

How to Select the Right Consulting Partner

Which leads us neatly to our next topic—how to select the right partner. Clearly, when it comes to consultants, there is a very wide spectrum of firms and individuals from which to choose—in terms of type of support, type / size of firm, geographic footprint, and price point. Let's take a quick look at the three main groups of Procurement consultants: the large global firms, the smaller specialist firms, and the contractor market.

All the big firms—the strategy houses like McKinsey, BCG, and others, and the audit-based firms like PwC and Deloitte—have a Procurement offering and would be keen to take your money. The big firms have very broad capabilities and a huge amount of expertise. They also have powerful brands, and it's no doubt easier to sell your Procurement strategy to your Board, if said strategy is endorsed by McKinsey. These firms are also almost all truly global in nature—an important consideration in cross-border Procurement. They typically have very strong executive-level relationships with their clients, which they leverage to get things done in the organization. They're credible, they're glossy, and this can really help to bring an organization together around a shared goal. And finally, the global firms have very large industry practices—so, if your purchases are very industry-specific (such as chemicals, for example), then this industry knowledge can be very helpful.

In 25 years pitching Procurement projects in competition with the global firms, your authors have had plenty of success—but when we did lose against the large firms, it was for one of three reasons only: (i) greater geographic presence, (ii) better strategic level industry insight, and (iii) pre-existing relationships—the large firms are often already well positioned with many clients. The “minuses” of the larger firms are: (i) depth of expertise in Procurement, which varies significantly across the larger firms, and (ii) price—the day rates of the global firms, particularly the strategy houses, are still very expensive, and companies with revenues below $300 or $400m struggle to make the economics work…their spend is not big enough to yield a strong return on investment from engaging these firms.

Next up are the specialist Procurement consulting firms. There has been a trend towards using functional experts in consulting for the last 25 or so years, and the Procurement specialist firms have been growing at pace. Particularly the Private Equity houses, which work extensively with the strategy firms during due diligence and acquisition, often prefer to use experts in areas like Procurement and pricing, where subject matter expertise is important.

However, the specialist firms don't necessarily come with a brand you know you can rely on. They're smaller and less well known, and you have to know the players to understand their relative quality levels, which can vary widely. The quality of the people is also much more variable—the big firms have a set formula for how, and from where, to recruit and grow their people, and the quality level is very homogenous. The smaller firms tend to be a more diverse collection of individuals from different backgrounds, so there tends to be less consistency and uniformity. There can also be a somewhat formulaic / “sausage machine” approach that does not lend itself well to the more strategic and complex categories, which is why most specialist firms focus on indirect Procurement.

The big plus of the specialist firms, on the other hand, is that they often have more subject-matter expertise. Where the big firms are sometimes accused of being too generalist, the key advantage of the specialists is that they're focused on what they do, and they know their stuff.

And it's less about the category experience, as we said before—it's more about the sourcing experience. Experience in where to obtain the data to build the baseline, ability to build a complex dynamic bid analysis tool, and experience in pulling together a supplier RFP launch meeting that makes the suppliers take the exercise seriously.

Relevant execution skills…knowing what to do to start collecting data, knowing upfront what types of sourcing strategies are worth considering. If you can find a niche firm that combines this hands-on expertise with strategic thinking and very strong individuals, then you can quickly find yourself in territory where the specialist firm could be more effective. Having said that, we would recommend that you probe their mix of experience across direct and indirect spend—there are many “indirects houses” that are not fit-for-purpose for strategically sourcing complex direct materials.

The second fundamental reason to think about a specialist firm is cost and ROI. The niche firms have much lower day rates than the premium generalist firms: their rates are less than half of those of the global firms, and often even lower. And then there's ROI—large multi-national companies, with spends in the billions of dollars, can achieve an excellent ROI from using a premium firm, whereas, say, a mid-cap company with only $150m of Procurement spend will find the fees exorbitant in relation to the savings, and is effectively priced out of the premium firm market by the small magnitude of its spend. This is leading the niche firms to target the mid-market that can't afford the large firms … which, in turn, has spurred the growth and development of the niche firms over the last 20 years. The large consulting houses are impressive organizations with highly talented people and very deep client relationships. In the last 20 years, they have been joined by a small number of high-caliber specialists that warrant serious consideration.

One deciding factor between generalist and niche may be your geographic footprint. If you're a global or even multi-national organization, you will struggle to find many specialist firms that can match your footprint in terms of their office locations or their ability to deploy. That's because most smaller firms struggle to develop beyond their original market. There are a number of German firms, British firms, and US firms, but many of them don't reach beyond their own borders, which is clearly a limiting factor in the world of Procurement. Growing a consulting firm beyond 100 people is very difficult, so that's another indicator—size as a proxy for success.

The third option, when looking for external help, is the contractor market—in other words, individual contractors / sole traders. These resources are considerably cheaper than even the niche firms and often come loaded with many years of Procurement experience. I have seen many clients turn to the contractor route when faced with multi-million-dollar consulting engagements. However, we believe firmly that this is a false economy. The quality is highly variable in the contractor market and is not in any way pre-vetted; individual contractors may or may not have proper consulting skills; they typically move at a slower pace than consulting firms; and there is a risk that they become quasi-employees that are difficult to “turn off.”

The biggest drawback is that you're now managing a group of disparate individuals who don't even know each other, rather than managing a professional firm. It can take months or even years to get people to play from the same playbook; and with a consultancy, consistency of approach is core. Our recommendation: use contractors to plug gaps in your team, but don't use them in lieu of a consulting firm in the mistaken belief that you're getting something similar for a lower price—you're not.

Buying a cohesive team is something very different to buying a group of separate individuals. The saving from using contractors is not there when you look on a “TCO basis;” you will find that a group of contractors will likely not achieve the same result as a consulting firm. They're fundamentally not the same thing, period. That's why the price is so much lower.

How do you choose the right firm? Consulting firms can be very difficult to select, because there is no tangible product to look at. Invite five of them in to give a PowerPoint presentation on their approach to Procurement, and their chevron charts all look much the same. Also, what you get in the pitch room is not the product you're buying, day-to-day. That partner may be a brilliant presenter and salesman, but he / she is not the one who will be working in your organization. So, make sure you vet the individual people.

And here again, you don't always need category experience. “Gray-haired experts” who have 25 years of experience sourcing bearings…these end-of-careerers are not the droids you're looking for if you want to make transformational change and a massive impact on your company's profitability. But equally, if no-one on the team is older than 25, you might have a problem.

Once you know which firm you want to work with, make sure you get a commitment to get their best people, their A team. Every firm has an A, B, and C team, so reach for the cream, and be sure to do this during the competitive selection process, while you still have leverage.

How Should I Best Use the Consultants?

Just a few thoughts on this question. (Obvious) point number one: use the consultants on the high impact stuff. We've been invited to tender on Procurement consulting projects looking at “the tail spend” many, many times. It's a model whereby the client addresses the strategic categories and suppliers with their internal team and uses consultants to manage “B spend” and “C spend.”

Now, if you have a world-class team, then that makes sense. But when you have a “stone age” Procurement team, why have your $60k buyer manage the strategic categories and have your $3,000 to $5,000 a day consultant look after the tail of small suppliers, which is hugely effort-intensive for very little return. It will go down well with your internal team…but it doesn't make any sense.

The answer is, of course, to team the consultants up with your best people and have them address the strategic categories together. Don't bring in consultants and then work to minimize their scope. It's not a good approach!

Beyond that, as we said before, the skillset of consultants matches well with Strategic Sourcing: a mix of analytical, commercial, people, and communication skills is what works, and good consultants tend to have these. So, have the consultants do the sourcing, either doubling up with your buyers, while your buyer dedicates only 15–20% of their time to the project, but the consultant supports him or her full-time by driving the data gathering, doing the analytics, and preparing the discussion documents needed to get people on board; or, if your team is not yet fully in place, let the consultants drive some categories while you drive the others.

By deploying consultants on sourcing execution roles, you're making sure that their deliverable is a new supplier contract, rather than a stack of PowerPoint slides. Using highly talented consultants in a purely advisory capacity is a waste—get them to deliver savings, not reports!

How Do I Make Sure That I Get the Best Value from My Consultants?

That's a slightly different question to “How should I best use them?” How do you make sure you get best value from your consultants? The short answer is that it's all about the long-term sustainability of what they deliver.

So much good consulting work goes nowhere, and it has nothing to do with the quality of the advice. The reason for lack of impact from a consulting program is most likely that what was done was not transferred to your people, so it died out when the consultants left. And that's the big risk with any consulting program—will it have any impact, or will it be another shelved report?

So, Rule Number One is to integrate the consultants with your best people. Or, if you don't have any best people yet, borrow some from Finance or elsewhere. You need to be sure that by the time the consultant involved in that Energy sourcing project packs his bags, your Energy buyer has a full understanding of the sourcing process, the reasons we chose the chosen suppliers, the agreed volumes, and pricing, the terms of the contract, etc. That's a lot of detail, so be sure your people are at least shadowing the consultants wherever possible.

In an ideal world, you would have planned your sourcing program so that the Bearings sourcing project lead becomes the Bearings category buyer at the end of the process. That way, there is continuity in the role, and the loss of the consultant is much more manageable.

The second rule is, make sure they leave something behind. At a bare minimum, of course, make sure they hand over working files, spreadsheets, and what have you. But beyond that, these days consultants come equipped with analysis tools, templates, even technologies (spend analytics, e-sourcing, contract management, …)—good sourcing consultants will leave their category with an ordering system, a savings tracking process and tool, and an ongoing supplier review, and management process in place. The more of the consultant's output can be enshrined in a simple technology tool, the more chance that it will be applied going forward. So, make sure to ask your consultants, “What are you going to leave behind for me?”

Third, do not allow an atmosphere of “us and them” to develop between your people and the consultants. It is completely normal and to-be-expected that your people will feel threatened and defensive when the consultants first come through the door. Personally I've found most client leaders struggle to deal with consultant versus employee issues. For some, the solution is to focus their own people on some parts of the program, while having the consultants take care of others. But this effectively then delineates and splits their roles and targets, which is a no-no. Join the targets up, “one team, one baseline, one saving,” otherwise you'll spend half your time arguing over who gets credit for what.

In a similar vein, risk–reward / savings-based commercial arrangements can make things worse if they are not properly thought through. They can drive the wrong behaviors in your people and in the consultants, and if the targets are divisive, they will again drive an “us and them” dynamic.

This chapter does not offer advice on the consultants' pricing, but we will say that risk-reward commercials can be very workable and powerful if set up in the right way. Unfortunately, we've seen more unbalanced models than balanced ones—a balanced model being one where the consultant assumes a reasonable amount of risk in return for a fair reward. It is human nature to push these things too far, and unequitable risk-reward arrangements are very common.

If you do enter into such an arrangement, make sure that you don't make the mistake of not thinking about the fees until project end. It is essential to manage the fee discussion from Day One: be clear on the targets, monitor the savings progression, and agree on the principles of how to agree on savings in each category—ideally at the time of establishing the baseline. The more you work on this throughout, the less surprises, mismatched expectations, and arguments you can expect at the end.

It's All About the People

Ultimately, of course, consulting is all about people.

As mentioned before, Job One is to make sure that you're getting the consultancy's best people, their “A team.” This can only really be done at the beginning, and you should use the competitive tension of the selection process to push for the firm's best resources.

It's also in your interest to make sure you get enough time and attention from the partner—the more time he or she spends on the job, the better his or her people should perform. Plus, you'll want to use the partner as a sounding board and a confidant. During the first three or four weeks of the program, a pattern of partner visit frequency will naturally emerge; if you're demanding during these weeks, the pattern will be one of frequent visits; if you're not, it won't.

As with all team endeavors, constant communication and feedback are of the upmost importance. Over the years I've had a few clients who had an approach of “give the consultants a damn good kicking every few weeks, to avoid them becoming complacent.” Well, it was not pleasant, I can say that…but it sure did work.

As a client, when you shout at the consultants or complain to them, you get their attention. To a professional services firm, the client is sacrosanct, and what the client says, goes. So, make sure you're being heard…at all times, and loud and clear. Of course, a good kicking is only effective if there's sometimes also a hug. Like all humans, consultants just want a bit of recognition…or should I say, as insecure over-achievers, they crave recognition a lot more than most people. The more junior people, in particular, will hugely appreciate even a small piece of positive client feedback, and this will no doubt give a boost to their motivation and performance.

Back to the other extreme…if you really can't get along with one of the consultants, then say so, and insist on a replacement. I remember launching a big sourcing transformation program with a client in the UK, where we deployed over 20 consultants, which is a big team. Once my team had been onboarded, the client came to me to explain that he loved 18 of the 20, but two of them didn't fit and had to be switched out. My reaction was that the client was well within his rights to insist on this, and it didn't really cost me anything, just a call to our Staffing team to make a swap.

Weaning Yourself Off the Drug

It has been said that consulting is like a drug, that once you make your first buy, you'll end up dependent on them, and unable to get them back out (that is, assuming the collaboration was a success!).

Certainly, a client who buys a consulting project receives an injection of talent, momentum, and horsepower, and it's easy to become dependent on your consultants. They're high-caliber people, they work around the clock, and they do what you ask—sometimes more willingly, quickly, and effectively than your own team. So, what to do to avoid dependence?

The answer is, to continue the drug analogy, most definitely not to terminate the consultants “cold turkey”—it would put the body in shock, unable to cope with the sudden blanket withdrawal. Much better to wean yourself off over time. In the world of sourcing, that's particularly pertinent. You're likely embarking on an 18- to 24-month program divided into three or four sourcing waves; and you're slowly onboarding and educating your own team.

So…use the consultants heavily in the initial waves of sourcing, to show your team the way, and then gradually, over subsequent waves of sourcing, have your team take up the reins and learn to become self-sufficient. I've personally sold many Procurement transformation programs on this “weaning off” basis—Figure 11.1 illustrates the concept.

If you read the detail in Figure 11.1, you will see that significant efforts were made to enable and smooth the transition from consultant-led to client-led. The sourcing process was not only used by the teams, it was fully embedded across the organization; supporting tools and technologies were put in place; and a multi-module Strategic Sourcing training program was rolled out to all Procurement staff globally. And it worked! It wasn't perfect…it was still not easy for the client to lose the support of the consultants. But the program continued, and the savings kept rolling in, long after the consultants were gone.

It was one of the most successful programs of my career, and key to it was the concept of “in Wave I, we'll take the lead and show you what to do; in Wave II, we will hold your hand…; and in Wave III, we'll set you free.” The best part about it is that the client started with very little skill or credibility residing in their Procurement function.

So, in Wave I, we consultants were indeed the teachers, and we were literally building up the client's capability from scratch. But we were also delivering massive savings to the business: so, rather than asking the broader client organization to invest in Procurement for 12 months while we built up the capability…we gave them savings after only six months. And, of course, the savings then helped boost the credibility and the confidence of the Procurement team further, and the whole thing became a virtuous cycle.

Conclusion: plan for the end of the consultants proactively from Day One and set out a gradual shift of ownership from the consultants to your team. But be under no illusion: once the consultants leave, it will be more difficult to keep up the drumbeat, it will be harder to push the business, and it will be harder to get the work done. Make sure your team really is ready to pick up the reins.

What Do We Do When It All Goes Horribly Wrong…or How to Avoid That Happening

It's beyond the remit of this book to go into detail about how to effectively run a consulting program. But it's worth giving just a little thought to the nightmare scenario, of which there are many real-life examples, of your project spinning out of control and you having to throw good money after bad in an effort to turn it around.

The most infamous consulting screw-ups are scenarios in which a bad situation was allowed to continue without an effective rescue intervention. I have one client who ended up spending $1 billion implementing an ERP system across the U.K. and the U.S. And this is a non-manufacturing company!

The good news about sourcing projects is that they can usually be turned around. The key is to spot the problem, call a time out, re-tool, and go again.

I've had several projects in my career that have run into major problems, where the client has called me and said he / she was not happy. Upon examination, the sourcing teams were spinning, the business was not engaged, things were a mess.

In my experience, the key in these situations is to create an intervention. Admit that there is a major problem (and nobody wants to admit that to their boss, and the consultant certainly doesn't want to admit it to the client). Admit that there is a problem, create a detailed and formal “get out of the s***” plan, make some visible people changes (usually that's the problem anyway), and then mount a massive project rescue effort. Unfortunately, human nature is often to take the very opposite approach—minimize the problem, keep everyone happy, don't rock the boat, kick the can down the road.

Of course, the real answer is to not allow things to reach that point in the first place. And that's down to good program management. Most important of all is proper governance and full and active stakeholder engagement. If the CFO never shows up to the Steering Committee, and the head of the largest business unit sends her assistant, you're going nowhere. In my experience, there is a direct correlation between the success of a project and the degree and consistency of C-level engagement. When there is great C-level engagement, half the battle is won.

Beyond this, a successful project needs a central drumbeat that drives it forward relentlessly, which usually takes the form of a Program Office. That Office has to avoid being a bureaucratic burden, but instead create a cascade of diarized calls and meetings that drive the program forward. This includes weekly sourcing team meetings, weekly sourcing team PMO update calls, weekly leadership update calls, and monthly Steering Committees. It's a sausage machine that needs to work seamlessly.

For a large sourcing program, you should have a two-person PMO: the consultancy's day-to-day program manager, typically Senior Engagement Manager or Principal level, working full time; and your own overall program manager. This is the most critical appointment of your Procurement transformation.

Your program manager sits at the heart of the program, managing the whole suite of stakeholders involved. His or her job is to constantly remove blockages that occur within each sourcing team. The stakeholder refuses to give them their data, the data doesn't exist, France and Italy have not replied to any of the information requests, the Engineering Director is planning a parallel initiative to look at his supply base, the Marketing supplier has contacted the Marketing Director directly in an effort to undermine the bid process. Your PMO person needs to get all of these small obstacles cleared. So, he / she needs to be very well connected in the organization, liked by his / her peers, respected by senior management, not afraid to speak his / her mind, and, above all, tenacious.

Proper governance and senior stakeholder involvement then, along with a structured PMO that includes a strong lead from the client side, are key to avoiding project meltdown in the first place.

Coming back to the consultant joke at the start of this chapter—so, is Procurement consulting really just a lot of hot air? The answer is, of course, it is what you make it.

Procurement consulting is like Procurement technology, in that you can't just buy it and expect to thereby fix everything; you have to deploy it in the right way, you have to combine it appropriately with your existing resources, and you have to make sure you get a quantifiable and healthy return on your investment.

Hopefully this chapter has provided some useful thinking around why, when, and where you might engage consultants, how to select the right ones and, once selected, how best to work with them so that you yield maximum value from the project.

If you get it right, the use of consultants can be a fantastic launchpad for a Procurement transformation program. It makes sense to use them early in the journey, while your people are not yet in place, to drive savings and to “show the way” to your people. Just make sure you have a plan for “weaning yourself off”—like overcoming a drug addiction, take the drug away carefully over time, by having your people assume more and more of the “driving” over the life of the program.

And talking of people…make sure you put your best people on the project, working hand-in-glove with the consultants. That way, they absorb the knowledge of the consultants along the way, and there won't be any issues when it comes to saying good-bye.