Purchasing departments are at a turning point: driven by performance requirements, regulatory pressure, and the need to accelerate their digitalization, they no longer have a choice and must position themselves as key players in business transformation.
And at the heart of this transformation, intellectual services are more than ever back in the spotlight. Complex, heterogeneous, and sometimes poorly defined, they alone concentrate the challenges of budget visibility, compliance, and efficiency. However, in many companies, management could be improved through existing high-performance tools.
This was the focus of the Matinale event organized by Décision Achats, during which Romain Lopez, Managing Director of Eleven VMS, shared his vision of intelligent service management and the reasons why VMS is becoming essential.
Too many companies still manage their purchasing blindly
Reality can sometimes be confusing. Many organizations, even among the most structured, continue to manage their intellectual services using Excel files, email exchanges, or telephone approvals. As a result, they have fragmented visibility into expenses, active service providers, types of assignments, and compliance with contractual commitments.
As Romain Lopez pointed out, this situation is becoming increasingly untenable. Budgets allocated to intellectual services are skyrocketing, but without centralized management, so are inefficiencies.
Intellectual service expenses are constantly rising, and we can no longer afford not to manage them properly.
However, awareness is definitely growing. In just two years, Eleven VMS's customer portfolio has jumped by 50%, demonstrating a strong desire in the market to equip itself.
Purchasing departments at the heart of service performance
Today, the purchase of intellectual services is no longer a marginal category. The rise of freelancing, the proliferation of digital services companies (more than 15,000 in France) and the growing outsourcing of skills make this category of purchasing a key lever of competitiveness for companies.
But beyond this market evolution, intellectual services raise specific operational, legal, and financial issues. They require careful and rigorous management. It is necessary to be able to identify precisely who is working for the company, within what scope, with what results, and under what contractual framework. However, in many companies, this visibility is still lacking, particularly after years of decentralized or manual management.
Purchasing departments must therefore reposition themselves as true business partners, capable of structuring this strategic expenditure. In addition to price negotiation, their role now includes:
monitoring contractual compliance,
managing the supplier panel (digital services companies, consultancies, freelancers, etc.),
the performance of services delivered,
and sharing data with business lines to support decision-making.
Faced with these challenges, a simple ERP or e-procurement tool is no longer enough. What is needed is a specialized solution designed to manage intellectual services from start to finish: a Vendor Management System.
Adoption that goes beyond the IT sphere alone
Historically focused on IT service management, VMS projects are now expanding into other areas. Marketing, legal, engineering, and support functions: all departments that consume external services are affected.
Geographic expansion is also a key issue. Many companies, initially equipped in France, are now deploying their VMS on a European or even global scale. This not only standardizes practices, but also ensures legal and contractual compliance in complex environments.
A tool, but above all a strategic partner
A smart, connected, and scalable solution
Eleven VMS is a cross-functional management system designed to bring together purchasing, business teams, finance, HR, and legal departments on a single platform. Its goal is to simplify the management of intellectual services while providing a clear, shared, and structured vision.
The platform integrates seamlessly into the customer's technological environment thanks to its advanced interfacing capabilities with existing ERP, HRIS, and e-procurement solutions. Rather than adding another layer of complexity, it centralizes data, streamlines exchanges, and helps build a unified information system around the procurement of intellectual services.
On the product side, Eleven VMS offers powerful features that enhance day-to-day operational performance. Artificial intelligence, in particular, becomes a real lever for predictive management: automatic recommendation of service providers, optimization of requests for proposals, anticipation of budget overruns, and detection of anomalies. Thanks to these advanced features, companies can move from reactive to strategic management.
Expert support for adoption
Eleven VMS offers more than just a platform; it provides structured human support. Each client benefits from a dedicated project manager, a Customer Success Manager specializing in the procurement of intellectual services, and multilingual support. This approach ensures smooth and sustainable adoption, tailored to the specific needs of each organization.
Our VMS empowers operational staff to independently find the right resource for their project. At the same time, we enable Purchasing to maintain control in the background.
The keys to successful adoption
Deploying a VMS is not just about installing a tool. It is a transformation project that requires aligning the right people, framing the right processes, and providing a seamless user experience. To succeed, three levers are essential.
1. Get the right stakeholders on board
A VMS project involves many departments: purchasing, finance, HR, legal, IT, etc., as well as the business lines. Their involvement early on is essential to build buy-in, align objectives, and develop a solution that is truly useful on a daily basis. Without alignment, there will be no adoption.
2. Adopt the right processes
Deploying a VMS also provides an opportunity to simplify and harmonize service management processes. This involves establishing clear rules on competitive bidding, contracting, task monitoring, and validation processing. The VMS then becomes a structuring framework rather than an additional constraint.
3. Rely on the right tool
The ergonomics of the solution are crucial in promoting user adoption. Eleven VMS has been designed with particular attention to UX/UI, to make the user experience simple, fast, and intuitive. The platform also integrates automation features based on artificial intelligence: service provider suggestions, automatic document generation, compliance alerts, etc. All of these efficiency gains naturally increase the adoption rate.
Once these three levers are activated, the results are quick to materialize.
Measurable results in the field
With more than 75 major clients and €7 billion in transactions managed, Eleven VMS has a tangible impact. Companies are seeing increased competition, a decline in the use of private agreements, and measurable results:
an average 11% reduction in costs, 50% operational optimization, and 100% control over their purchasing categories.
The platform also includes an intelligent dashboard that allows suppliers' performance to be monitored based on specific criteria: profile code, seniority, region, etc. This dynamic supplier listing method improves the quality of panels and informs data-driven decision-making.
Finally, the customer-supplier relationship is strengthened: VMS makes processes more transparent. Service providers understand the rules of the game and see an increase in requests thanks to the decline in private agreements.
Conclusion
Faced with the rise of intellectual services, companies no longer have a choice. To effectively manage this strategic purchasing category, they must equip themselves with a modern, integrated, and performance-oriented Vendor Management System.
With Eleven VMS, they find much more than a platform: a transformation partner capable of structuring, automating, and elevating the purchasing function to the heart of the corporate strategy.
