Consulting SRM keeps falling through the cracks. Ever wondered why?

Supplier relationship management works reasonably well in most categories. Consulting is the exception.

Not because procurement teams lack discipline or ambition—but because consulting sits in an awkward no man’s land. It’s strategic, cross-functional, hard to define, and even harder to measure. Category managers usually know how much is spent on consulting, but rarely ce que the money actually paid for. Strategy here, transformation there, a bit of HR, a dash of communication—often with the same suppliers wearing different hats.

Add to that the structural issue: nobody truly owns consulting. Unlike HR services or financial services, consulting cuts across business units and stakeholders. Feedback is scattered, performance measurement is inconsistent, and supplier relationships tend to rely more on personal connections between partners and executives than on any formal, institutional framework.

Unsurprisingly, SRM suffers – a pattern Consource has repeatedly observed across the les plus grands défis dans le domaine des services-conseils en approvisionnement. Business reviews happen—sometimes—but they’re often annual, contractual, and backward-looking. Value creation, delivery quality, and knowledge transfer remain difficult to assess. And because visibility is limited, supplier management becomes reactive rather than strategic.

This is where supplier onboarding plays a much bigger role than it’s usually given credit for.

In most organizations, onboarding is treated as a compliance exercise: forms, validations, approvals, done. For consulting—services intellectuels, as the French more accurately call them—this approach is not only bureaucratic, it’s counterproductive. Onboarding should be the moment where the relationship moves from personal à institutional: where expectations, governance, and ways of working are made explicit, and where the foundations for long-term supplier relationship management are set.

When designed properly, the supplier onboarding process becomes the first SRM lever—not an administrative hurdle, but a strategic touchpoint. And when supported by a platform built specifically for the consulting lifecycle, like Consource.io, it connects naturally to sourcing, project delivery, performance tracking, and category strategy .

That’s exactly what this article explores: supplier relationship management best practices for consulting, starting with onboarding—and showing how Consource.io helps procurement teams finally manage consulting suppliers with the structure and visibility the category deserves.

1. Why Supplier Onboarding Matters More for Consulting Than Any Other Category

In plenty of categories, onboarding is a gate. You pass it, you’re in, everyone moves on with their lives.

In consulting, onboarding is more like setting the rules of a chess game… while the pieces are still being carved, and half the players are “just observing.” It’s the moment where you decide whether you’ll run consulting suppliers like strategic partners—or like recurring plot twists.

Consulting is services intellectuels: messy, contextual, people-driven. Which means the supplier relationship will either be conçu early… or it will be improvised later. Improvisation is fun in jazz. In SRM, it’s expensive.

1.1 Consulting is strategic. So onboarding cannot be “admin with a badge.”

Consulting doesn’t just deliver outputs. It influences decisions, priorities, operating models—sometimes even how leadership thinks about its own competence (ouch). Yet many onboarding processes treat consulting like it’s office supplies with better PowerPoint.

That mismatch creates the first failure mode: procurement establishes a supplier as “approved,” while the business establishes the supplier as “trusted,” and nobody aligns what that trust is supposed to produce, how it will be governed, or what “good” looks like beyond a contract and a day rate.

A consulting onboarding that actually serves SRM does three things from day one:

• Clarifies the purpose: why this supplier, for what types of work, under what conditions
• Defines the rules of engagement: how the business and procurement work together (yes, together)
• Sets expectations for value: not in poetry, in operational terms—ways of working, delivery hygiene, evidence of impact

This is where digitalization stops being a buzzword and becomes practical: visibility, efficiency, governance—those aren’t “nice to have.” They’re the minimum viable control system for a strategic category.

1.2 Fragmentation doesn’t happen later. It starts right here.

Consulting SRM often fails for a simple structural reason: consulting is everywhere, so it belongs to no one.

HR has “consulting.” Finance has “consulting.” Transformation has “consulting.” Communication has “consulting.” Sometimes the same supplier is doing all of it, under different labels, different owners, and different narratives (“they’re strategic partners” / “they’re just extra hands” / “they’re doing that thing nobody wants to own”).

So procurement sees a total number—often a big one—but not the anatomy of that spend. And without anatomy, SRM becomes theatre: you can review “the supplier,” but not the reality.

Onboarding is where you either reduce fragmentation—or institutionalize it. A mature approach uses onboarding to establish:

• One supplier identity (not four versions of the same firm in four subcategories)
• A shared classification of work (what counts as consulting vs adjacent intellectual services)
• A consistent governance baseline across stakeholders and business units

This is exactly why a category-specific platform matters: centralizing supplier information and standardizing process prevents the “parallel universes” effect procurement teams know too well.

1.3 Personal relationships are powerful. That’s precisely why you must institutionalize them.

Let’s be honest: consulting runs on relationships. The partner knows your leaders, your politics, your pressure points. They can help you move faster.

They can also help themselves move faster.

Some firms explicitly coach consultants to build mutual dependency: I think of you and you think of me. Translation: your career, my pipeline. It’s not always cynical; it’s simply how relationship-led selling scales. But the effect is real: the relationship can become personal capital instead of organizational value.

If your SRM depends on who knows whom, you don’t have SRM. You have social networking with invoices.

Onboarding is the moment to keep the human strength of consulting—while removing the institutional fragility. Not by “de-romanticizing” relationships, but by making them governable:

• Roles and decision paths: who sponsors, who validates, who arbitrates when reality diverges from the statement of work
• Ways of working: how scope evolves, how knowledge transfers, how decisions are documented
• Feedback mechanics: how you collect input beyond one sponsor (because one sponsor is… one opinion)
• Performance principles: what will be reviewed, how often, based on which evidence

Do this early, and the relationship survives turnover, reorganizations, and the classic consulting move of “your favorite partner is now ‘global lead’ and mysteriously unavailable.”

1.4 Compliance-only onboarding is like setting a speed limit and calling it a driving strategy.

Yes, you need NDAs. Security checks. Validations. Approvals. Of course.

But if onboarding ends there, you’ve built a compliance gate—not a supplier relationship.

For consulting, SRM-ready onboarding must answer four practical questions that compliance documents politely ignore:

• How will we govern engagements across multiple stakeholders?
• What does success look like beyond deliverables and rates?
• How will we collect feedback in a category with no single owner?
• How will we keep learnings, benchmarks, and performance signals—rather than resetting every project?

This is where onboarding stops being bureaucracy and becomes the first strategic touchpoint in a broader lifecycle: from qualification to sourcing, delivery tracking, and supplier performance management—strategize, buy, deliver.

2. The Chronic SRM Problems Consulting Procurement Teams Face

If consulting supplier relationship management feels harder than it should, it’s not because your teams are underperforming. It’s because the category quietly breaks most of the assumptions traditional SRM is built on.

The problems show up again and again, across industries and geographies. Different symptoms, same underlying mechanics. And almost all of them trace back to what wasn’t structured early—often at onboarding.

2.1 “We Know the Spend”… Except We Don’t

Ask most procurement teams how much they spend on consulting, and you’ll get a number. Ask what that spend actually funded, and the conversation suddenly becomes… interpretive.

Strategy work is mixed with transformation support. PMO blends into operational reinforcement. Change management quietly becomes communication. The same supplier appears under multiple cost centers, scopes, and narratives—sometimes in the same year.

This isn’t a competence issue. It’s a visibility problem.

When consulting suppliers are onboarded without a clear classification of what kind of work they are allowed to do, spend analysis becomes retrospective archaeology. You can count the bones, but reconstructing the dinosaur is a guess.

Without structured supplier data and consistent onboarding rules, SRM discussions start from shaky ground: “Are we spending too much?” becomes “We’re not entirely sure what we’re spending on.” Not a strong opening move.

2.2 Performance Measurement: The Awkward Silence in SRM Meetings

Consulting performance is notoriously difficult to measure—and so, often, it simply isn’t.

Business reviews focus on what’s easy: rates, contractual compliance, volume of work. The harder questions—Did this actually help? Was the impact worth the effort? Would we do it again the same way?—are left politely unasked.

Why? Because consulting outcomes are shared outcomes. Success depends on internal teams, leadership alignment, timing, and execution—not just the supplier. That complexity makes performance evaluation uncomfortable, especially when there’s no agreed framework.

Without a structured way to capture feedback across stakeholders and projects, SRM becomes anecdotal. One sponsor loved the work. Another was less convinced. Procurement is left mediating opinions rather than managing performance.

This is exactly why performance thinking must start early, at onboarding—before projects blur into memory and subjective narratives replace evidence.

2.3 One Category, Many Masters (and No Real Owner)

Unlike HR services or financial services, consulting doesn’t have a natural home. It belongs to everyone—and therefore to no one.

There’s an old saying: a slave with two masters is a free man. Consulting often lives that paradox. With multiple sponsors, no single owner, and blurred accountability, suppliers operate with significant freedom—not because governance is strong, but because it’s diluted.

From an SRM perspective, this is where things quietly unravel. Who owns the relationship? Who consolidates feedback? Who decides whether a supplier is truly strategic—or simply well-connected?

Without a shared onboarding and governance framework, supplier management fragments along organizational lines. The supplier adapts as they always do. The organization loses coherence.

A consulting-specific SRM approach recognizes this reality and designs processes that work across stakeholders, not in spite of them—centralizing information while allowing local relevance.

2.4 Definition: Consulting vs Services (and the Industry’s Favorite Blur)

The biggest confusion isn’t whether a project is “strategic” or “operational.” It’s whether the supplier is advising ou doing—and how each should be governed.

Procurement and stakeholders often try to separate consulting from services using the wrong signals: project vs retainer, fixed price vs time & materials, short vs long. Those describe commercial wrappers, not the work.

A more useful distinction is this:

• Conseil = advising with deliverables/outcomes, backed by methodologies, frameworks, IP, and tools.
• Prestations de service = doing through execution capacity, processes, repeatability, and operational continuity.

Now the twist: many consulting firms intentionally offer both. Over the last 5–10 years, advisory revenue (irregular by nature) has been complemented by services, managed offerings, and sometimes software (predictable by design). So the same supplier may advise you on a roadmap on Monday—and provide execution capacity on Tuesday—often at a premium.

If you’re not clear on the difference between consulting and services, then you’re not in charge of the relationship. The supplier is.

And that matters, because the price tags are very different.

Consulting is priced for thinking, structuring, and advising. Services are priced for execution and capacity. When the boundary isn’t explicit, it becomes remarkably easy for suppliers to “take you for a ride”—to deliver services at consulting prices. Conveniently, the reverse never seems to happen.

The result is familiar: large invoices that are hard to challenge, because the nature of the work was never clearly framed. Was this strategic advisory? Or was it execution with a premium badge? Without clarity, procurement is left negotiating after the fact—usually from a weak position.

This isn’t about semantics. It’s about control. If onboarding doesn’t define what kind of relationship you’re establishing—advisory, services, or a deliberate mix—you hand pricing power, scope interpretation, and value perception straight to the supplier.

And once that happens, SRM isn’t just blurred. It’s performative.

2.5 Business Reviews: Annual, Contractual, and Usually Too Late

Most organizations review consulting performance at supplier level. Once a year. Sometimes.

That’s already too late—but it’s also fundamentally flawed.

Consulting performance does not belong to a supplier. It belongs to a project. And more precisely, to the partner or engagement manager running it. Consulting is an intellectual service: what really drives outcomes is the expertise, judgment, and leadership of the person steering the work—not the logo on the slide. And sometimes, let’s be honest, the client plays a role too—more than we usually admit.

In reality, SRM reviews rarely reflect this. Most of the time, performance feedback is reduced to a vague question—“So… what do you think of this supplier?”—asked long after the project is over. There is no distinction between projects, no differentiation between partners, and no structured way to capture what actually happened.

Procurement often doesn’t realize how misleading this is. A strong partner can mask weak deliveries. A failed project can unfairly stain an entire firm. Nuanced reality collapses into a polite, non-committal average. At that point, “supplier performance” becomes an opinion poll—useful for conversation, useless for decisions.

What actually works is continuous, project-level feedback—light, structured, and captured while delivery is happening. Not to “score suppliers,” but to:

• distinguish partners and teams, not just firms
• build evidence instead of anecdotes
• feed future sourcing decisions with something better than reputation

Without that continuity, every new consulting project starts with collective amnesia. And SRM becomes a yearly ritual where everyone agrees—sincerely—that next year, this time, it will be different.

3. Supplier Onboarding Best Practices for Consulting SRM

If we diagnosed the problems, now let’s we stop philosophizing and start designing rules that actually work.

In consulting, onboarding is not a one-off administrative step tied to a Master Services Agreement. It’s a recurring control point, project-sensitive, and deeply linked to what the supplier is allowed to do—not just who they are.

Done properly, consulting onboarding answers three questions very clearly:

1. What can this supplier do?
2. What can they not do?
3. Under which conditions does the relationship apply?

Everything else is noise.

3.1 Onboarding Is Not “Once and for All” — Some Rules Must Be Reiterated

Most organizations assume that once a supplier is onboarded and the MSA is signed, the job is done. In consulting, that assumption is risky.

Certain elements must be explicitly reiterated, especially for sensitive projects:

• Confidentialité, particularly when consultants work across competitors or adjacent markets
• Conflicts of interest, which are not theoretical in consulting, but structural
• Information boundaries, especially in transformation, strategy, M&A, or regulatory topics

Relying on a contract signed years ago is not governance. It’s optimism.

A mature onboarding approach treats these elements as contextual safeguards: they are reaffirmed when the project requires it, not just when the supplier enters the vendor master. This protects the organization—and also removes ambiguity for consultants, who otherwise operate in grey zones by default.

3.2 Onboarding Is About Scope: What They Do, and What They Don’t

One of the most common onboarding failures is leaving scope deliberately vague.

Many consulting firms faire claim they can do everything. And from a marketing perspective, fair enough. From an SRM perspective, that’s precisely what must be constrained.

Onboarding should make explicit:

• Which types of consulting the supplier is qualified for
• Which capabilities are approved
• Which activities are excluded or require specific validation

You are under no obligation to use a supplier across all their claimed capabilities. Qualification is not endorsement; it’s permission with boundaries.

This is critical for two reasons:

1. It prevents scope drift disguised as “added value”
2. It creates a rational basis for supplier comparison and portfolio strategy

Without this clarity, SRM becomes reactive: suppliers expand organically, and procurement discovers new “capabilities” only once invoices arrive.

3.3 Consulting vs Services: Decide Early, or Pay Later

If a supplier provides both consulting and services, this must be explicit at onboarding. Not in footnotes. Not implicitly. Explicitly.

Why? Because the governance, pricing logic, and expectations are fundamentally different.

Best practice is simple, even if execution isn’t:

• One supplier, one procurement contract
• Clear differentiation inside that contract between:
  • advisory work (consulting)
  • execution work (services)

Even if several category managers are involved behind the scenes—because the supplier crosses categories—the supplier relationship itself must be coherent. Fragmented contracts create arbitrage opportunities. And suppliers are very good at spotting those.

If you don’t structure this upfront, you lose control of:

• pricing logic,
• scope interpretation,
• and escalation leverage.

And once again, consulting prices tend to travel downwards into services far more easily than the other way around.

3.4 Design the Process for Consulting — Not Against It

Many large organizations pride themselves on “robust” onboarding processes. In consulting, robustness often translates into exclusion.

Typical requirements:

• minimum revenue thresholds (e.g. €10M+),
• extremely long payment terms (120, 180 days),
• heavy administrative burdens designed for industrial suppliers.

The result? Small and mid-sized consulting firms—often the most specialized, innovative, and impactful—are filtered out before anyone even looks at their expertise.

This is a structural mistake.

En consultation, quality and expertise do not correlate with size. At all. Some of the best consultants operate in small structures precisely because expertise, not scale, is the value driver.

A good onboarding process distinguishes between:

• what is necessary for risk management, et
• what is accidental bureaucracy inherited from other categories.

If your onboarding process eliminates suppliers by design, you’re not managing risk—you’re narrowing your access to talent.

3.5 Onboarding as an SRM Design Tool, Not a Compliance Gate

Put together, these best practices point to a simple conclusion:
consulting onboarding is where SRM is designed, not where suppliers are merely approved.

A strong onboarding process:

• reiterates critical rules when context requires it
• defines scope and boundaries clearly
• distinguishes advisory from services explicitly
• keeps the supplier relationship coherent, even across categories
• and is demanding without being exclusionary

This is exactly why onboarding cannot be isolated from the rest of the consulting lifecycle. It has to connect naturally to sourcing decisions, project governance, and performance feedback. Platforms like Consource.io are built around this logic: onboarding as a structured, reusable foundation, not a bureaucratic speed bump, enabling visibility, governance, and consistency across consulting engagements.

4. How Consource.io Restores Visibility — and With It, Control

Consulting procurement has many problems. But most of them trace back to two very basic ones: limited visibility on spend, and limited visibility on the supplier panel.

When you don’t clearly see who your main suppliers are, what they actually do, and at what price they intervene, everything downstream weakens — governance, SRM, business reviews.

In many organizations, consulting is considered “managed” because it appears in a category tree and produces a spend figure. Day to day, stakeholders call who they trust, suppliers influence the sourcing process, and procurement mainly formalizes decisions once they’ve already been made.

4.1 Spend Visibility: Knowing the Number Is Not Knowing the Spend

Most consulting procurement teams can produce a total spend figure — yet still struggle with consulting spend visibility. What they struggle to do—consistently—is explain what that figure contains.

Ask a simple follow-up question—what did we buy, exactly?—and the tone changes. The answer is usually sensible, just scattered. One part sits in strategy, another in transformation, a third in “support.” The same supplier shows up under different cost centers, different project names, sometimes different stories. Everyone has their piece of the puzzle, and the puzzle is never assembled.

This isn’t laziness. It’s a structural blind spot. Consulting spend spreads across stakeholders and projects so effectively that consolidation becomes a nice idea rather than a habit. Procurement ends up with a number that looks reassuring in a dashboard and remains strangely unhelpful the moment you try to manage the category.

C'est ici que Consource earns its keep. By centralizing consulting projects, spend data, and supplier information, it gives procurement a readable view of how consulting is actually used: which suppliers are engaged, what types of projects they work on, which stakeholders use them, and at what price levels. Patterns stop arriving as a surprise after invoices have been approved, and start appearing early enough to influence decisions.

Once that visibility exists, three basic questions stop being a monthly archaeological expedition:

• Who are our main consulting suppliers?
• What types of projects do they actually work on?
• At what price levels are they engaged?

When procurement can answer those three questions, supplier conversations suddenly become concrete. When it can’t, everyone falls back on reputation, relationships, and whatever the last project felt like.

4.2 Panel Visibility: Approved Does Not Mean Known

The second structural weakness in consulting procurement is the supplier panel itself.

Most organizations technically have an “approved supplier list.” In practice, it’s a static register that answers one question only: is this supplier allowed to work with us?

What it doesn’t answer is far more important:

• Who can do what?
• Who is actually good at what?
• Who should be used for this type of project — and who should not?

Consource addresses this by treating the supplier panel as a living SRM object, not a compliance artefact. Through a supplier dashboard and integrated SRM tooling, suppliers are managed from two angles at the same time:

• Procurement view: contracts, scope, spend, performance, governance
• Stakeholder view: capabilities, relevance, past delivery, perceived strengths

This is how you move from “approved suppliers” to an intelligent panel — one that supports sourcing decisions instead of passively validating them.

4.3 Panel-First Sourcing (So You Stop Reinventing the Wheel Every Time)

In many organizations, sourcing consulting suppliers still starts the same way:
“Who do we know?”

Consource flips that logic by enforcing a panel-first approach. When a project is launched, the starting point is not personal networks or last-minute recommendations, but the existing supplier ecosystem — already qualified, already governed, already visible.

That does two things immediately:

• It disciplines sourcing without slowing it down
• It forces the organization to reuse knowledge instead of resetting to zero

Panel-first sourcing is not about restricting choice. It’s about making choice intentional.

4.4 Governance at Project Level: NDA and Conflict of Interest Are Not One-Time Events

You made this point very clearly, and it’s one of the most overlooked aspects of consulting SRM.

An NDA signed years ago does not protect you on a sensitive project today — governance must be actively designed, including through a winning consulting agreement. A conflict-of-interest clause in an MSA does not manage conflicts by itself.

En Consource, governance steps like NDAs and conflict-of-interest checks are embedded at project level, not buried in historical contracts. That means they can be reiterated when the context requires it — exactly where consulting risk actually lives.

This is not about adding friction. It’s about removing ambiguity — for the client and for the supplier. Grey zones are comfortable for consultants. They are expensive for organizations.

4.5 Performance Where It Belongs — Then Aggregated Where It’s Useful

Consulting performance cannot be meaningfully measured once a year, at supplier level, based on vague impressions. You’ve said it yourself.

Consource’s logic is straightforward:

• Performance is captured at project level, while delivery is still fresh.
• Feedback reflects reality: what worked, what didn’t, under which conditions.
• That data is then aggregated at supplier level to support business reviews.

This avoids the classic SRM trap:

• punishing good partners for others’ failures,
• or protecting weak deliveries behind a strong brand.

Business reviews stop being diplomatic conversations and start being evidence-based discussions.

Conclusion — If Onboarding Is Vague, You’ve Already Lost Control

In consulting, ambiguity is not neutral. It is profitable — just rarely for the client. When onboarding doesn’t clearly define what a supplier is here to do, what they are not allowed to do, and under which conditions the relationship applies, the supplier fills the gaps. Scope stretches. Prices follow. And procurement is left explaining invoices it never truly governed.

This is why consulting SRM so often feels powerless. Not because the category is impossible to manage, but because control is surrendered early, quietly, under the label of “flexibility” or “trust.” Consulting firms don’t need to break the rules when the rules were never made explicit. And once projects are running, it’s already too late to pretend the conversation is still about strategy.

Onboarding is the last moment where the relationship can be shaped before money, influence, and delivery dynamics take over. Treat it as administration, and you inherit whatever relationship the supplier prefers. Treat it as a strategic act, and you decide how consulting is used, priced, governed, and evaluated — project by project, partner by partner.

Consource.io exists for that exact reason: to give consulting procurement teams a way to impose clarity where the category naturally resists it, and structure where informal power usually wins.

Réserver une visite guidée gratuite de Consource.io and see how your consulting procurement can finally work the way it should.