The spring tradition is to clean house, and that means your house of business as well. Chances are there a number of areas of your operation that need to be cleaned up, but the place to start is your evergreen contracts. Most organizations have significant overspend in these contracts because prices have dropped, demand has increased, and/or new options have entered the market — but since the organization decided to set, and forget, these contracts, it has not been able to take advantage of new options, negotiate against the increased demand, or realize the reduced prices.

So how do you start?

First, make sure all of your contracts are in electronic form and in a central electronic filing cabinet.

How do you do this?

Acquire a good OCR solution and feed all your paper contracts through it and create a set of contract e-documents.

Then, acquire a good network drive scanner to find all of your e-contracts. Some might be part of the scanned set (as they were printed out and filed), some might be duplicates (as different users might put them on different drives), and some might be draft versions.

Finally, to get a complete (as you can) distinct set of contracts, run them through a semantic process that can identify similar documents that will group all documents that are highly similar into a set and identify the (likely) final version based on dates (and differences between similar documents).

Then, figure out which contracts are, or could become, evergreen …

How do you do this?

Acquire and apply a semantic analytic solution that can sift through the contract clauses, identify the term, and whether or not the contract is, or could become, evergreen.

… and order them by upcoming (auto) renewal date.

This is just a simple sort, which can be done by exporting the contract titles and (auto) renewal dates to a spreadsheet which is easily sorted.

Then do a spend analysis (and projection) on each category defined by the contracts, in (auto) renewal order, and when the savings percentage is significant (near double digits) or the savings amount is significant (many 3X to 5X times what a category re-sourcing would cost), provided there is enough time to re-source, you queue up the sourcing event. If there is not enough savings potential, or time, you add it to the end of the queue to be reanalyzed sufficiently in advance of the next auto-renewal date.

Eventually you’ll work your way through all the evergreen contracts, and replace them (with non-evergreen contracts) in order of priority, defined by savings potential.

And that’s how you start your evergreen contract spring cleaning.