Case Study: How a Global Professional Services Firm Uses Traction to Connect Client Needs to Scalable Technology Solutions

Overview

Global professional services firms are under constant pressure to help clients solve complex business problems using the right mix of emerging technologies, vendors, and partners. But as organizations scale, technology discovery and evaluation often become fragmented, inconsistent, and overly dependent on individual consultant networks.

This case study explores how a global professional services company with more than 65,000 consultants worldwide uses Traction, an AI-powered innovation management platform, to systematically scout, evaluate, pilot, and manage technology solutions that meet client-specific needs — while building a reusable, enterprise-wide catalog of vetted vendors and partners.

The Challenge: Scaling Technology Discovery Across a Global Consulting Workforce

Consultants across the firm regularly identified client needs that could be addressed through new technologies — from data platforms and AI tools to industry-specific software solutions. However, the firm lacked a consistent, scalable way to:

• Discover technologies aligned to client-specific requirements
• Evaluate vendors consistently across regions and service lines
• Validate solutions through pilots before recommending them to clients
• Securely manage vendor and alliance partnerships
• Share proven solutions across a globally distributed workforce

As a result, technology discovery and evaluation were largely manual, regionally siloed, and dependent on personal networks. This limited reuse, slowed client delivery, and increased risk when recommending unvalidated solutions.

The Solution: An End-to-End Innovation Management Platform

The firm adopted Traction Technology to serve as a central system of record for innovation and technology partnerships — connecting client needs to external solutions through a structured, repeatable workflow.

Traction enabled the firm to manage the full lifecycle of innovation:

• Capturing client needs and opportunity statements
• Scouting for relevant technologies and vendors
• Evaluating solutions using standardized criteria
• Running pilots to validate scalability and client impact
• Governing vendor and alliance partnerships securely

All within a single, AI-enabled platform.

Technology Scouting Aligned to Client Needs

Client requirements and problem statements were first captured in Traction by consultants and practice teams. These inputs created a clear demand signal for innovation and technology sourcing.

Using Traction’s technology scouting capabilities, innovation and alliance teams then proactively searched for solutions that matched each client’s specific needs. This included:

• Scouting startups, scale-ups, and established vendors
• Identifying emerging technologies across industries
• Supplementing inbound vendor applications with targeted discovery

This “hunt and gather” approach ensured broader market coverage than relying on inbound vendor outreach alone.

Structured Vendor Evaluation and Shortlisting

Once potential solutions were identified, Traction was used to standardize how each technology was evaluated.

Evaluation workflows included:

• Capability and functional fit
• Scalability and enterprise readiness
• Security and compliance considerations
• Alignment with client requirements

By applying consistent evaluation criteria across regions and service lines, the firm reduced subjectivity and ensured that recommendations were defensible and repeatable.

Shortlists could be created quickly, accelerating time from discovery to client recommendation.

Running Pilots to Validate Client Impact and Scalability

Shortlisted technologies were moved into structured pilot workflows within Traction.

Each pilot included:

• Clear objectives and success criteria
• Defined KPIs aligned to client outcomes
• Documentation of results and lessons learned

Pilots allowed the firm to validate that solutions could scale and deliver measurable value in real client environments — reducing risk before broader deployment or recommendation.

Secure Vendor and Alliance Partnership Management

Beyond discovery and evaluation, Traction served as a secure system of record for managing vendor and alliance partnerships.

Approved vendors and partners were:

• Categorized and tagged by capability and industry
• Governed centrally with visibility into performance and usage
• Tracked over time as relationships evolved

This ensured consistency, reduced duplication, and improved risk management across the firm’s partner ecosystem.

Building a Global Catalog of Vetted Technology Solutions

One of the most impactful outcomes was the creation of a searchable, continuously evolving catalog of vetted vendors and solutions.

Consultants across the global workforce could:

• Quickly identify proven technologies relevant to client needs
• Reuse prior evaluations and pilot results
• Avoid restarting discovery and due diligence from scratch

As more solutions were evaluated and piloted, institutional knowledge compounded — strengthening the firm’s ability to deliver technology-enabled outcomes at scale.

The Impact

By using Traction as its innovation management platform, the firm achieved:

• Faster identification of technology solutions aligned to client needs
• Reduced duplication of effort across regions and practices
• Higher confidence in vendor recommendations backed by evaluation and pilot evidence
• Improved governance and consistency across alliance partnerships
• A scalable foundation for technology-enabled client delivery

Why It Matters

For professional services organizations, innovation only creates value when it can be reliably delivered to clients.

Traction enabled this firm to move from informal, network-driven technology discovery to a repeatable, enterprise-grade innovation workflow — connecting client needs to evaluated technologies, validated pilots, and governed partnerships across a global consulting organization.

About Traction Technology

Traction Technology helps enterprise innovation teams bring structure and consistency to how ideas, emerging technologies, and innovation projects are evaluated, prioritized, and scaled.

Recognized by Gartner as a leading Innovation Management Platform, Traction Technology applies Traction AI to innovation decision-making — helping global enterprises reduce risk, improve alignment, and move initiatives from experimentation to execution with confidence.

Explore more powerful case studies and how Traction Innovation Management Platform is used to evaluate vendors and partnerships.

“By accelerating technology discovery and evaluation, Traction Technology delivers a faster time-to-innovation and supports revenue-generating digital transformation initiatives.”
— Global F100 Manufacturing CIO

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