Your procurement director at a 300-person Brisbane energy retailer just closed a two-year CRM licence after the consultant-led RFP locked scope to the vendor demo environment. Any data handoff to the existing billing engine now triggers a separate change-order process with its own margin stack.
The contract lists 'integration readiness' as a one-line milestone payable on vendor confirmation. It contains no allowance for the three-week mapping exercise the internal team ran once real customer records hit the staging tenant and revealed duplicate identifiers the sales team had never disclosed.
Consultant capture shows up in the renewal clause. The same firm that wrote the original requirements matrix gains first right of refusal on every variation at pre-agreed day rates that already exceed the original project budget. Walking away means restarting the entire tender under the same rigid template.
The payment schedule front-loads 60 percent on contract execution and another 30 percent at go-live. The final 10 percent is held for 'hypercare', a period too short to expose the downstream reconciliation failures that only surface after two full billing cycles.
Internal teams now route every new requirement through the vendor's change-control portal because the original agreement treats knowledge gained during live operation as out-of-scope work. The energy retailer pays twice: once for the platform and again for the privilege of learning how its own data actually flows.
Procurement still measures success by contract signature date and consultant utilisation reports. No metric tracks the cumulative cost of deferred integration decisions or the growing backlog of workarounds that sit outside the formal system.
The next renewal lands in eighteen months. By then the architecture debt will be large enough that switching vendors looks even more expensive than accepting another locked-scope extension.