Your procurement director signs a two-year platform agreement that defines success strictly by the original statement of work. Any change after go-live triggers variation pricing that the finance team has already flagged as off-limits.
Integration work sits outside the main licence line item. The vendor’s implementation partner therefore owns every mapping, workflow tweak and data clean-up task under a separate time-and-materials wrapper that resets every quarter.
When the first production users request a minor field change, the contract treats it as scope creep. The only approved route is another consultant workshop whose output must be signed off by the same steering committee that approved the original spec six months earlier.
Learning stops at the first milestone payment. Teams discover that the platform’s actual usage patterns contradict the requirements gathered during the sales cycle, yet the agreement contains no budget or mechanism to revise the integration based on that evidence.
The consultants, paid to keep the project green, naturally recommend more of their own time rather than handing control back to internal staff. Each extension deepens dependency while the original platform remains only partially connected to core systems.
Boards see the same traffic-light report month after month because the metric that matters—whether the purchased capability now runs without external intervention—is never defined in the contract.
Next time the sourcing team evaluates a new platform, they must require explicit clauses that fund a short, post-launch iteration window and cap consultant hours after the first six weeks. Without those terms the platform simply becomes another line item that never escapes the consultants who installed it.