Procurement timelines for a meaningful vendor decision routinely stretch to eight or twelve weeks. Ask what's actually happening during most of that time, and the honest answer is often: waiting. Waiting for a meeting to get scheduled. Waiting for a proposal to get reviewed by someone who's been travelling. Waiting for a reference call to get returned.
The actual work is a fraction of the calendar time
Genuine due diligence, real reference conversations, a document review, a specific technical or compliance question answered directly, takes hours per vendor, not weeks. Multiplied across three or four serious options, a properly resourced evaluation is a matter of days of actual work. What stretches it to months is scheduling friction and the fact that the person doing the evaluating is also running their actual job at the same time.
What a compressed, thorough timeline looks like
Start from a shortlist that has already been filtered for credibility, so no time is spent disqualifying options that were never serious contenders. Run reference calls and document review in parallel across the shortlist rather than sequentially. Decide against defined criteria agreed before the calls started, not criteria that drift as new information comes in.
Done this way, a genuinely diligent vendor decision, for most mid-sized commitments, takes one to two weeks, not one to two quarters.
Why it usually doesn't happen this way
Compressing the timeline requires someone dedicated to running it in parallel, which most executives don't have the bandwidth to be for a vendor decision that isn't their core job. That is the specific gap a private sourcing process is built to close: the parallel work happens before the shortlist ever reaches you.