Don't know if it's still the same, but I suspect it will be - another insidious part of the 3rd party consultant relationship is (was) that customers would hire

Don't know if it's still the same, but I suspect it will be - another insidious part of the 3rd party consultant relationship is (was) that customers would hire one of the big 5 to help them evaluate and select ERP systems. And that consultancy would also be in a consortium with one of the suppliers (usually SAP), to do the implementation. Isn't that a conflict of interest you would ask? Oh no, the two parts of the consultancy are behind strict Chinese walls, and the evaluation was strictly independent of the bid team. But surprisingly, the vendor they were in bed with always won the contract. As a sales rep with Oracle, I declined to bid on a project. I offered the CFO to write the name of the winning consortium in a sealed envelope, that he could open when the selection was announced.