Bonjour from Paris!  Welcome to Consulting Sourcing Spark!

I'm Helene Laffitte, the CEO of Consulting Quest Holding. We are delighted to have you in our reader's circle and hope that you would enjoy our collection of thought leadership publications that we have curated this month. We also share some inside scoops about our brand for our discernible subscribers; we're sure, you would love that, too.

After Macron's government faced the public backlash for “overspending” on consultancy just weeks before the re-election, we decided to go the whole hog and dig at the controversy. One reason, that the Macron government had to face such harsh criticism, according to our understanding, was the absence of an efficient procurement system for public offices.

Digitization of the public sector and the management of the pandemic were the two primary areas that Macron's government procured consultancy for. Outcomes for these two areas are indeed the most difficult to assess. While it is not that difficult for experts to realize and even identify progress, that cannot be expected from the mass. For the public, the French government did lack transparency and a system to track and measure the outcomes of its consulting investments.

A well-structured sourcing and procurement model could have reversed the scenario, helping Macron's team in assessing the positive impacts of the project and sharing it with the public. This underscores the importance of a well-defined procurement model for both the public and the private sector. Such a system would help both entities to better use, buy and manage their consulting expenses.

It’s however pure coincidence that one of our most loved podcasts on procurement makes it to the Don’t-Miss- It section. It’s about the latest trends in procurement and how they are paving the way for absolute digitization.

Now, coming back to the home front, many exciting things have been happening lately. We have just welcomed the latest member to our multi-national team, our annual survey is on full swing, our Smart Consulting Sourcing podcast series is creating buzz! We are just a few weeks away from the 100th episode and we already had 2000 plus podcast downloads.

And know what? We launched our second podcast series this month – we named it, ‘consulting Game Changers’. Yes, you guessed it right – we are super excited about it. Also, we just had our latest webinar on 7th June -- “How to implement demand management for consulting?” Excuse us for gushing like a proud mother, but we are really exhilarated about the way it turned out to be a great interactive session with over 200 attendees from all time zones joining us live.

Last but not the least; this month we have added two more insights to our thought leadership resources. Our case is always very straightforward – at CQ, we believe that smart procurement does make a difference – and hence, our insights are designed to share knowledge about streamlining your procurement process. Check the “What Is New’ section.

Today, procurement is a truly dynamic field. Did you know that Cloud Technology, Cognitive Procurement, Blockchain, and a slew of other new digital developments are altering the way we think about procurement and how it’s organised and carried out?

We’ll take a look at a few hot new trends and examine how they’re shaping procurement today. Also, try to predict where they’ll lead us in the future.

We are launching our annual consulting procurement maturity assessment survey and we would love you to hear from you!

The goal of this survey is to get a measure of how well companies like yours handle their consulting sourcing. We have prepared a short, 10-question survey. At the end of the survey, you will know where you stand on our consulting procurement maturity grid.

When the survey is over (Expected end date: July, 31st 2022), we will send you short, personalized feedback with your positioning versus peers along with some recommendations for improvement.

In this webinar, we examined various aspects of demand planning process, based on industry standards and best practices.

It was designed to help businesses looking to build an agile demand management system that is aligned to their business objectives, while keeping consulting procurement expenses under control.

You can watch the recorded webinar on our YouTube channel.

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By joining our global Beta testing team, you can get an exclusive preview of our application. Moreover, you can also be a part of our game-changing innovation.

Be a Beta tester A.K.A Superuser of our application and you bet, you would enjoy every bit of it while helping us improve our application. Up for it? Let's do it.