After spending several painful months negotiating contracts with your vendor partners and haggling over every cent for IT resource rates, you finally managed to get the best rate card across multiple roles and geographies. So with a little help from some run-of-the-mill, rate-compliance monitoring system, the hundreds or thousands of projects with these contracted vendors will run on cruise control, right? Wrong. A few months down the line, you’ll notice you are paying more for every hour of work than you were prior to the rate negotiations, even though the rates were negotiated down by 5–10% across the board.