What we have learned across 500+ IT sourcing, vendor management and transformation engagements — written by the people who ran them. Filter on the right.
Strategy, frameworks, and what works — from 500+ engagements and €3B in negotiated contract volume.
The 8 categories where overpayment hides, the renegotiation envelope, the 30/60/90 playbook.
Zero Vendor Deviation™: the methodology that makes vendor responses comparable line-for-line.
Why vendor sprawl isn't a procurement problem, and the architecture rationalization lands on.
The 7-stage lifecycle, the 8 renewal traps, and what AI contract analysis actually finds.
The asymmetry between how customers and suppliers get managed — and how to close it.
The IT operational excellence pillar: landscape assessment, process mining, application rationalization.
Three-tier vendor governance, scorecards that actually drive behaviour, and the cadence that produces decisions.
The IT leader's sourcing guide: cloud governance, hyperscaler management, transformation that scales.
SRM vs CLM vs VMS, the evaluation criteria that matter, the 5 failure modes that recur.
The function, the scope, the five capability pillars. What makes vendor management different from procurement.
Practical framework, not theory. Each stage with its failure modes and the controls that catch them.
A 12-month build path. Scope, structure, capabilities, tooling — in the order that produces early value.
Three layers, three cadences, three sets of decisions. Skipping any layer is the most common cause of governance decay.
Five dimensions: delivery, commercial, risk, relationship, innovation. Plus the metrics that look authoritative but tell you nothing.
Used interchangeably. They shouldn't be. In mature organizations they're different functions with different scopes and governance.
Across 500+ engagements: 15–25% of vendor spend leaks through seven specific channels. Almost none shows up in the budget.
25 diagnostic questions. The honest scoring most self-assessments don't produce.
Five evaluation dimensions. The framework that surfaces real differentiation. Plus the four failure modes.
Too complex for SME approaches, too small for enterprise VMOs. The hybrid model that actually fits.
Where 15–25% of IT vendor spend leaks. The structural gap between contract signature and contract delivery. Named, sized, and closeable.
Seven categories. Five scoring signals each. Three escalation thresholds. Operational from day one.
Most reviews are theatre. Here's how to run one that produces decisions instead of slide decks.
Not an exceptional finding. The structural baseline. Where it hides, and why you almost never see it without external benchmark.
The most reliable mechanism for converting one-time decisions into permanent overpayments. Hides in 60%+ of mid-cap portfolios.
The function that owns the supplier portfolio across the lifecycle. Often confused with procurement.
Aventario's RFP methodology. Built so vendors cannot deviate from the structure of the question.
Three terms, three jobs. The confusion between them is where most SLA disputes actually live.
The default supplier-segmentation tool, applied to IT. Four quadrants, four approaches, one critical mistake.
Seven categories. Each has a different signal, a different cadence, and a different forum.
A master agreement that pre-negotiates terms. The leverage tool when designed well; the lock-in trap when designed badly.
Two different jobs, two different management models. Mistaking one for the other reliably destroys value.
The residue of many reasonable local decisions, made in the absence of a global view. Invisible until it isn't.
The buyer-side capability that holds an outsourcing provider accountable. Frequently assumed to come with the deal.
Reconstructing actual process behaviour from system event logs. The documented process and the real one are different.
The mechanism that handles in-flight scope change. Reliably the largest source of uncontrolled cost growth in IT outsourcing.
The scoring tool that turns qualitative responses into a defensible ranking. Also where most RFPs introduce bias.
The discipline of grouping vendors by strategic value so management effort matches relationship value.
The structured process of managing IT contracts from request to renewal. Most organizations think they have it; few actually do.
Five stages: reactive, defined, managed, integrated, optimized. Most DACH mid-caps sit at stage 2.
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More articles publishing across the next 18 months. 244 of 284 pipeline articles remain.