Every major procurement vendor and every Big Four consulting practice is selling you the same thing: someone else’s solution to someone else’s problem. There’s a reason why procurement technology implementation failure rates are upwards of 80%.
They just don’t say that in the deck.
The Business Model Requires Them to Ignore Your Context
Think about how the unit economics of enterprise procurement software actually work.
A platform vendor grows by reusing the same configuration, the same templates, the same implementation playbook across hundreds of clients. A consulting firm scales by deploying the same methodology, trained into the same junior cohort, billed at the same rate. Customization is the enemy of scale. Context is the enemy of margin.
So the industry optimizes against both.
Rory Sutherland Diagnosed This Before Anyone Called It a Procurement Problem
In Alchemy, Sutherland writes:
“The drive to be rational has led people to seek political and economic laws that are akin to the laws of physics – universally true and applicable. The caste of rational decision makers requires generalisable laws to allow them confidently to pronounce on matters without needing to consider the specifics of the situation. And in reality ‘context’ is often the most important thing in determining how people think, behave and act; this simple fact dooms many universal models from the start. Because in order to form universal laws, naïve rationalists have to pretend that context doesn’t matter.”
He was writing about economics. He might as well have been writing about the SAP Ariba implementation your team quietly stopped using eighteen months after go-live.
The “best practice” your vendor sold you is not a law of physics. It’s a heuristic from a different industry, on a different continent, in a different regulatory environment.
Context Is Not a Soft Variable. It Is the Variable.
We have hosted procurement processes for a first-of-kind joint electric bus tender spanning two Canadian municipalities with different legal frameworks and different political stakeholders. We have hosted Requests for Innovation for a startup ecosystem soliciting new ideas. These are not the same problem.
They don’t share stakeholders, timelines, evaluation criteria, or definitions of risk. Every major vendor would have walked in with the same demo.
This is why implementation failure rates in enterprise procurement technology remain stubbornly high. Not because the software is bad. Because it was configured for a buyer that doesn’t exist — the composite, median, context-free enterprise.
The Consulting Industry Made This Worse
The consulting firms were supposed to be the bridge. They were supposed to translate methodology into organizational reality.
Instead, they became the distribution channel for the same “best practice” thinking, packaged as bespoke advice and billed by the hour. When the implementation underperforms, they sell remediation. The model is self-perpetuating. Nice work if you can get it.
Too often, the buyer ends up with a tool that doesn’t fit and a bill for the privilege.
Context-First Is Not a Feature. It Is the Architecture.
Sextant begins every engagement before the platform is even opened.
We run a structured Pre-Adoption Readiness process: governance model, stakeholder alignment, category strategy, team capability. We surface the decisions that will determine whether a procurement technology succeeds or collects dust — before a single RFP is drafted.
None of our clients fit a template. That is the point.
If your current solution is asking you to fit its template, that is not a technology problem. It is a business model problem.
It is their business model problem.
And you are the one paying for it.