Category Archives: contract management

Don’t Kill ALL the Lawyers …

… but certainly think about how (much) and when you use them in Procurement and your organization as a whole.

Earlier this month, THE PROPHET asked a very important question regarding Lawyers, Contracts, Procurement, and Tech in 6 parts, which essentially boils down to:

When will advanced tech, especially the tech we have today, replace lawyers for most in-house and even on-retainer Legal services?
To which the doctor replied: Why hasn’t it already?

Right now we have legal-tech so good that you should NEVER use a lawyer to:

Write a contract.
In fact, if you have any contract writing skills at all, even without ANY tech whatsoever, odds are high in your favour that you will write a better contract without a lawyer, especially in tech and supply chain when you know your business, the risks, and the key agreements and protections you need in place and, frankly, the lawyer doesn’t.I can’t count the number of times I’ve been told this is a great contract and there’s nothing wrong with it as we paid XK (where X, depending on the contract type, starts at 5, 10, or even 15), when the contract is in fact mediocre at best, full of holes, and sometimes even worse than the contract the firm was using. But sunk cost fallacy takes full effect, and a slipshod effort by the paralegal, quickly reviewed by the counsel to make sure there is nothing glaringly wrong, and put before you with a big price tag becomes the greatest contract ever written.

And yes, a lawyer will know to look for the presence of key standard clauses that should be in every business contract and contract from your business but, guess what, so will any contract creation / analytics product on the market.

And yes, a lawyer can tell you the potential risks associated from veering away from a standard contract, standard terms & conditions, and standard mitigations, but, guess what, so will any contract creation / analytics product on the market.

There’s very little contract-related value a lawyer can offer that modern tech can’t do, especially in the hands of a tech-savvy contract manager who understands the purpose of a contract and writes the contract in plain English.

Locate the relevant statutes (laws), decisions, and regulations that affect your business.
There aren’t many valid uses for Gen-AI, but large document search and summarization is one valid use, and a use that usually works remarkably well (with a very low failure rate compared to other tasks wrongfully put to these LLMs). No need to pay thousands in hourly billables to dig up what these tools can dig up in minutes and you can review in hours.
Summarize your Financial and Legal (Reporting) Obligations with respect to all statutes and regulations that apply to you.
Again, this is one of the few valid uses for Gen-AI that works quite well as it’s just another type of document set summarization. So why pay a legal team dozens or hundreds of hours when you can get a highly accurate summary for next to nothing in comparison?
Summarize known incident response options, and known benefits/risks of each.
Again, this is one of the few valid uses for Gen-AI that works quite well as it’s just another form of document summarization. And while this won’t necessarily be 100% complete, or give you specific insight to your situation, it helps you get a handle on where you might start.

The reality is that you only need a lawyer to:

Do a final contract review.
To make sure you didn’t screw up a clause, miss a core enterprise requirement they have committed to memory, or address an upcoming risk or issue they happen to know about that you don’t. Considering this is all they really do anyway when you ask them to write a contract (as they are either sloughing it off to the paralegal or just pulling one from the file that is close to what they think you need and just making a few edits), just pay them for what they do that they are good at.
Review the list of statutes, regulations, and legal decisions you believe you are subject to.
Their in-depth knowledge of the law means that a good lawyer who practices in the relevant area will quickly be able to tell you whether or not each statute, regulation, and/or legal decision is relevant to you, key points you shouldn’t miss, and whether there are any statutes, regulations, and/or legal decisions they believe you should also be aware of because they are, or may be, relevant.
Review the financial and legal reporting you plan to do and advise you on completeness, correctness, and accuracy.
They know the law, and how to keep you in line with it.
Advise you on your incident response plan and best alternative options.
Again, these are legal experts who focus on mitigating risks and arguing for a living, unlike dumb algorithms which can just summarize which they are given. This is, or should be, the true value of your legal counsel and when you should really be paying the high hourly fees.

As to THE PROPHET‘s question as to:

When will it happen?
The answer is who knows?

Considering that good contract creation applications have been around for almost fifteen (15) years, where all you had to do was define clauses and variants by geography or category, standard templates by category, etc. and then rules for special situations, and it would assemble a custom template for you in minutes, the base technology should have been common a decade (10 years) ago. Now we have Gen-AI thrown into the mix which can analyze your contract repository, pre-populate your standard clauses and build starting templates, and then customize those based on the buy specifics, you can get a decent draft in minutes with very little manual effort.

We’ve had good semantic document summarization for well over a decade, and Gen-AI has taken that to a new level, most CLM vendors are integrating it, it’s easy to use, can be trained to be highly accurate for this task, and not expensive.

We’ve had good contract analytic solutions for about a decade, which can analyze all sorts of performance metrics, risk metrics, associated costs, and so on.

But yet these solutions have rarely been adopted, when they could save an organization a lot of money, help the organization get their risks under control, help the organization better manage their spend, and help the organization understand its supply chain.

This shouldn’t be surprising given that year after year, as per our recent myth-busting 2025 2015 trends, companies say they want strategic value but only focus on cost-cutting, but don’t even do that right. Only two technologies have been proven to support year-over-year cost reductions of 10% or more (adjusted for inflation), and those are

  1. (advanced) spend analysis
    (not the dinky projects some companies outsource to Big X who use second rate third party tools for poor results)
  2. (strategic sourcing decision) optimization

And how many companies have truly adopted these technologies AND use them in house? Our guess is less than 20% in the first case and we know it’s less than 10% in the second case. It’s like we said in our recent rant on You Don’t Need Gen-AI to Revolutionize Procurement and Supply Chain Management — Classic Analytics, Optimization, and Machine Learning that You Have Been Ignoring for Two Decades Will Do Just Fine!

Stop Wasting Your Time With Contract Management

The Mandarin (Yes, The Mandarin) recently posted a great article on why you should stop wasting your time with contract management

As the author clearly states, every department, state and federal, in which I have worked has a set of policies and directives on contracting and contract management. Almost every contract has a contract management plan. Yet we continue to get it badly wrong.

He quotes a recent review of Home Affairs which got a shellacking about their utter inability to reasonably prepare for the end of a contract (as well as other Procurement issues). It’s as he says, when it comes to preparation for contract termination, which should be part of a well formed contract management plan, it’s almost always “too little, too late”.

Contract Management isn’t working, and more importantly, neither are contract management platforms. (Making a colleague of mine who poo-poo’d them almost two decades ago as not worth your time, because they didn’t do any more than what a high schooler could do with some scripting and an access database, a visionary genius.)

So why do we get it so wrong? The author starts off by saying we think about contracts the wrong way, which we do (and there’ll be more on that later), especially since many approach it as a matter of performance and punishment since the contractor or vendor just needs to do what they promised and whatever performance or punishment framework included in the contract will encourage the contractor or vendor to deliver on time.

And, at the end of the day, most organizations just see it as a reporting and control framework, driven by compliance. When, as the author points out, it is supposed to be about outcomes, and, even more importantly, as the author points out, it should be a tool for managing the value chain.

The author then recommends that you fix things by:

  • owning the business outcomes
  • understanding and measuring mutual obligations
  • measuring, reporting, and managing the entire business, not just the odd contract
  • making what’s required visible and clear
  • not treating relationship management and contracting as mutually exclusive
  • using performance measures you understand

Which is all good advice, but not going to fix the fundamental problems. The fundamental problem is that it’s not contract management, it’s project fulfillment (even if you are just buying stuff).

This means that before you can do a contract you have to:

  • first develop a detailed project plan including requirements, desired outcomes, and timelines
  • identify what sub-plan you want to farm out to one (or more) vendor(s, but that requires a lot more planning and possibly subcontracting)
  • create the contract schedule with this plan as well as milestones, reporting requirements, and mutual obligations
  • decide what performance incentives or penalties you want to include to speed up performance and/or prevent late deliveries/completion
  • decide what matters (most) to you and what you are going to require around vendor geography, personnel, sustainability, etc. requirements
  • evaluate the risk and define appropriate mitigation (out) clauses
  • hand it off to legal to complete the Ts & Cs
  • then do a Procurement event
  • then complete it in negotiation, pushing the plan into your project management system once counter-signed

It’s project and relationship management at the end of the day, the rest is just document management, making CMS something that you can do with a high school student and an Access database, since its not where the contract is or how its indexed, but how it’s accessed and used on a daily basis, which should be through the project management system.

And that’s why Project Assurance is so critically important.

Don’t know what that is? Read my original and current series on Project Assurance:

The Sourcing Innovation Source-to-Pay+ Mega Map!

Please Use The 2026 V2 Mega Map Instead. Thank you!

Now slightly less useless than every other logo map that clogs your feeds!

1. Every vendor verified to still be operating as of 4 days ago!
Compare that to the maps that often have vendors / solutions that haven’t been in business / operating as a standalone entity in months on the day of release! (Or “best-of” lists that sometimes have vendors that haven’t existed in 4 years! the doctor has seen both — this year!)

2. Every vendor logo is clickable!
the doctor doesn’t know about you, but he finds it incredibly useless when all you get is a strange symbol with no explanation or a font so small that you would need an electron microscope to read it. So, to fix that, every logo is clickable so you can go to the site and at least figure out who the vendor is.

3. Every vendor is mapped to the closest standard category/categories!
Furthermore, every category has the standard definitions used by Sourcing Innovation and Spend Matters!
the doctor can’t make sense of random categories like “specialists” or “collaborative” or “innovative“, despises when maps follow this new age analyst/consultancy award trend and give you labels you just can’t use, and gets red in the face when two very distinct categories (like e-Sourcing and Marketplaces or Expenses and AP are merged into one). Now, the doctor will also readily admit that this means that not all vendors in a category are necessarily comparable on an apples-to-apples basis, but that was never the case anyway as most solutions in a category break down into subcategories and, for example, in Supplier Management (SXM) alone, you have a CORNED QUIP mash of solutions that could be focused on just a small subset of the (at least) ten different (primary) capabilities. (See the link on the sidebar that takes you to a post that indexes 90+ Supplier Management vendors across 10 key capabilities.)

Secure Download the PDF!  (or, use HTTP) [HTML]
(5.3M; Note that the Free Adobe Reader might choke on it; Preview on Mac or a Pro PDF application on Windows will work just fine)

MarketDojo has stepped up it’s Mid-Market Game!

The last time we covered MarketDojo (which recently had a majority stake in the company acquired by Esker) was in 2016 where we noted that marketdojo opens the dojo to suppliers as well after introducing you to MarketDojo in 2014 back when it was a simple RFX/e-Auction platform with some category intelligence and SIM (in our posts on how you could walk your own way and plan your own path). Since then, they have improved the platform greatly. For details on some of these improvements, we recommend their 2016 Vendor Analysis on Spend Matters by Jason Busch (Part I, Part II, and Part III) and their 2020 Vendor Analysis on Spend Matters by Magnus Bergfors (Part I, Part II, and Part III) [Pro or ContentHub subscription required].

Today, we’re going to quickly overview the primary capabilities of the platform, and then focus in on the new and advanced capabilities added since our last review.

MarketDojo is primarily an e-Sourcing platform with foundational supplier management (information and relationship capabilities) and contract tracking (baseline governance). (They still have their categorydojo solution, where they identify current market opportunities that you may want to pursue, but that isn’t the focus of this piece, so we will refer you back to previous articles for details on that functionality.)

e-Sourcing primarily consists of (multi-round) RFX capability, lot-based e-Auctions, and quick quotes (for quick one-time buys/quotes where full sourcing events are not needed). e-RFX creation is quick and easy — define some basic meta-data under settings, add any necessary documents, create the specific questionnaires and additional supplier data collection forms, define the items (which can be lotted in RFX as well as Auctions), add the collaborators (that can be given full access or limited view access), and even invite new suppliers (which can be onboarded later if the responses to the survey forms look good).

The major improvements and/or differentiation since we covered them last is in the


event instantiation
they now support templates, with a library of out-of-the-box templates (for the categories they track in categorydojo and then some) for RFX and e-Auction as well as custom templates built by the organization
survey creation
(in beta) you can now use Bard to identify common questions / characteristics of a category or product/service and then edit the form accordingly [which is a decent use of NLP, gives you some good ideas you might miss but keeps you, the intelligent human, in full control]
lots
lots now support transformational bids (where bids can be marked up by a percentage or a fixed amount to implement switching costs or penalties for reduced quality/utilization rations) as well as bids in DPD (Dynamic Parcel Distribution), FOB (Free on Board), and EXW (ExWorks).
bids
bids can defined as a complex formula over an arbitrary number of bid components and they support a brand new formula builder
collaborators
collaborators weren’t part of the initial solution, and they didn’t have tiered access
bid ranking
easily see the top bid for every item in every lot in a default lowest cost award scenario and easily dive in to see all the bids for every item of every lot in rank order
bid component ranking
see how every bid component ranks against all supplier bids for an item; this helps you identify the cost components that a #2 or #3 supplier (that you want to do business with) is not competitive on (such as freight, overhead, etc.), which might allow you to work with the supplier to get those cost components down to make their bid more competitive
dynamic RFX round creation
you can easily create a new round and control which suppliers and collaborators from the current round get invited to a new round

And, of course, the quick-quote functionality is brand new. These are super simple. All that a requester has to specify is what do they want, when do they want it by, what requirements must be satisfied, what are the payment terms, and which (approved) suppliers should it go out to and off the quote request can go. They can also attach spec documents, add special instructions, and request physical copies, but that’s not necessary. And if they want a certain currency or quotes in a certain unit of measure, that can also be specified. When the quotes come back, they’ll see an easy-to-understand quote summary and can choose one for award. Easy-peasy and, most importantly, the spend is captured and can be managed.

The supplier information management primarily covers the onboarding of new suppliers, to ensure that the appropriate information is captured, and then supports ongoing maintenance of the data. Onboarding is quite simple. A buyer defines the basic supplier information (name and corporate e-mail address), adds any mandatory and optional tags (such as DPST Tier, ESG, Minority, specialized category, etc.), selects the questionnaires they want the supplier to answer (of which a default set will be automatically selected upon tag definition), identifies the business users, either by role or by name, that will approve the forms as the supplier returns them, and then the corporate/contact email the onboarding request will be sent to (and the language the request should be sent in — it’s relevant to note that MarketDojo now supports 23 languages in its platform, but if you want the forms in 23 languages, someone will need to translate them, unless you are using MarketDojo out-of-the-box forms where those forms have already been translated).

The relationship management solution is straight-forward as well and is primarily designed to track supplier contacts and organizational users, associated sourcing events (that they participated in, not just awards), onboarding status (by requested survey/form) and associated surveys, contracts, identified innovation opportunities, and activities. Activities have a type (such as call, task, objective, audit, review), an assigned organizational user who is responsible for ensuring the supplier completes the activity, associated documents, organizational (and user) notes, and possibly even an (optional) associated hierarchy of sub-tasks.

Reporting has been updated and is currently supported in PowerBI through MarketDojo’s OpenAPI (and it is also supported by MarketDojos partner SpendKey) and the default built in reporting suite is pretty decent for a Sourcing platform with click-through dashboards on contracts, sourcing events, suppliers, overall spend, spend by category, spend by supplier, spend by country, spend distribution, PO (vs non-PO) Analysis, Compliance, and even Supply Chain Geographic Coverage. While not a full-fledged analytics platform by any stretch of the imagination, it’s enough to give buyers some insights as to where they may want to begin their analytics efforts if they are looking to increase savings, increase diversity, increase compliance, or decrease risk.

Contract management is baseline. It’s basically a searchable meta-data index of contracts, which can be associated with suppliers. However, for smaller mid-size organizations, that might be all they need.

MarketDojo is a great mid-market SIM-powered sourcing platform at an affordable mid-market price point.

SourceDogg dogs the Sourcing Process so You Don’t Have To!

SourceDogg was founded over a decade ago (in 2009 in Ireland, with the UK subsidiary opening a decade ago in 2013) by founders from the construction industry who decided they just didn’t have any good tools for sourcing products and managing suppliers. Since then, it has evolved into a full indirect Source-to-Contract application for requesting (intake support) and sourcing products (and services) (through traditional RFX and e-Auction), managing suppliers (with information, relationship, compliance, performance, and development support), and managing contracts for customers across a wide range of industries, including a strong customer base in manufacturing, pharma / health-care, and CPG/F&B.

Like the majority of modern Source-to-Contract applications, it is a fully SaaS-based product that can also be integrated with your organization’s ERP to pull supplier and product data, especially on initial product deployment. And, like the majority of modern Source-to-Contract applications, it has a fully functional Supplier Portal that allows suppliers to fully interact with all of the sourcing, management, and contracting processes employed by the organization.

The process starts with intake, where an organizational user can request a product or request a supplier. When a user needs a new product, they can go to the web portal and select the appropriate option (by clicking on the appropriate tile) that lets them do a general product request or a request in particular categories defined by the organization. When they make a general request, the application walks them through the process (using wizard-like functionality) to collect the appropriate information on category, volume, expected cost, requirements, etc. so that a buyer can kick off the appropriate sourcing process. Category specific requests function similarly, but are designed to minimize the process steps and information required for commonly requested categories. Now, if you’re using our core requirements for intake, as defined in Part 37 of our Source-to-Pay+ series Investigating Intake – Diving in to the Details, it’s not quite a full intake platform as there’s no budget tracking and process visibility (and in-process messaging depends on whether or not the requester is made a member of the sourcing event team), but it’s better than what many traditional sourcing platforms offer with respect to intake (if they even offer intake at all). Plus, SourceDogg is continually improving their product and we do expect their intake capabilities will continue to improve over time.

From intake, we move onto sourcing which supports full, multi-round, e-RFX and e-Auction with all of the typical functionality that you expect. One thing that stands out is their ability to include matrices (and built-in formulas) in not only the quotation fields, but all forms and elements of the process, allowing the organization to collect matrix options for product/packaging configurations, team configurations (on services), compliance/certification options, and so on.

As expected, setting up an event in SourceDogg is super easy. You define the typical sourcing event meta data (name, description, products, team, internal budget estimates, scoring system, etc.), create the content (forms and bid matrices), invite the suppliers (who need to already be defined/onboard in the core supplier management module), create the FAQ (which can be extended as needed during the process), and release it into the wild. (Suppliers can then login to their portal upon receiving the notification and fill it out within the designated window. If the bid sheets or data collection forms are complex, they can be output or collected using every Purchaser’s favourite tool and format, Microsoft Excel.) When the event concludes, the responses can be viewed, various side-by-side reports generated (and output to multiple standard formats including DOCX, PDF, and, of course, Microsoft Excel), responses scored, and final decision(s) recorded in the tool (and an email auto-generated and sent to the winning supplier[s] if desired). There is also the ability to capture notes at a question level (by individual who reviewed/scored the response), the supplier level, and the project level.

e-Auctions are setup similarly, and, as expected, run for a much shorter time. The degree of feedback presented to the suppliers depends on the configuration. Upon event completion, the platform automatically generates reports ranking the bidders on cost or, if the event was preceded by an RFI/RFP with a qualitative component, on a weighted score. (And, of course, the buyer can always go in and view the complete bid history.) Note that the Q&A feature can be used to post updates during the auction to all suppliers, a supplier group associated with a lot, or just a specific supplier who asked a question or obviously needs guidance.

Supplier Management consists of four primary modules: Supplier (Information) Management (SIM), Supplier Relationship Management (SRM), Supplier Performance Management (SPM), and Action Plans.

Let’s start with Supplier (Information) Management. The system tracks all the core supplier meta-data you would expect as well as all associated contacts, product data sheets, RFX and other data from specific collection effort (from SRM, SPM, or Development Actions) responses, certifications, contracts (including full version history support), other relevant documents (the organization wishes to track), and any critical notes. It also maintains a full-history of interaction with the supplier that can be viewed and queried as well as allowing the supplier to be tagged using category and location tags (that can be defined by both the buyer and supplier.

The Supplier Relationship Management module allows the organization to define supplier reviews, track the results of those reviews, and define actions to be completed by the supplier and followed up on by buyer personnel when the supplier indicates the action has been taken. It’s nothing fancy, but it gets the job done efficiently, and that’s what’s important.

The Supplier Performance Management module allows the organization to design and track KPIs and supplier scorecards in support of processes to measure, analyze and manage supplier performance. The scorecards can be simple or complex across a wide range of metrics and categories. It really depends on what data the organization has and is willing to collect (through surveys) or enter into the application. (At present, it does not integrate with risk/etc. data feeds out of the box, but if these feeds are pushed into your ERP and associated with suppliers and products, that data can be pulled in.) Creating a Performance Review is easy. Once simply creates an instance, and a record for every area, sub-area, and rating that one wants to record. The review can then be sent to as many team members as you want and they can be limited to rating specific areas, sub-areas, or records, as appropriate.

The Action Plans module allows for the creation of specific improvement plans and non-conformance reports for a supplier that needs to improve generally or specifically on one product. The Action Plan modules supports multiple default plans (called forms) that can be used to quickly an initiate a new action plan. The forms can be used as is or modified to the appropriate situation, and the monitoring team can include as many organizational personnel as required. Once a supplier responds, the team can then accept or reject the response, and once all responses have been accepted, the response can be approved and archived. If performance slips or the issue comes up again, an action plan can also be “reactivated” and parts, or all, of the plan kicked-off again.

Layered on top of all of the supplier related modules is a supplier visualization dashboard for non-procurement organizational users and executives that make it really easy to get statistics on organizational suppliers (total, approved, by-size [SME, MM, Large], by type [Product, Services, Subcontractor]) and filter down by category & sub-category, status, and other key identifiers as well as see the (subset of) suppliers on a map. From this primary visualization screen, the user can jump into individual supplier records (with key performance dashboards also displayed)

The contracts module, which revolves around contract governance, is very straight-forward and easy to use as well. Contracts can be grouped by area for easy human location, searched on key metadata and tags, and viewed within the tool. The default meta data is fairly extensive (and can be extended by the organization on implementation) and should capture all of the key information necessary to locate a contract, track expiry, track key terms, and track key clauses. While there’s nothing fancy about the contracts module, we want to re-iterate just how straight-forward it is for an average user to add a contract (addendum or updated version), define or edit the metadata, and locate any contract in the system quickly and easily. Some of the more advanced CLM tools focussed around negotiation support or analytics lose sight of the fact that the average person who needs to retrieve a contract is not a Procurement or Legal or Technology super user and just need a system that follows the KISS principle.

The entire suite also contains a fully modifiable tile-based entry dashboard that allows an average user to define the parts of the application they use, as well as any customized intake forms or application modules, organize them by frequency of access, and see which modules have updated information or new actions assigned to them.

This fully modifiable tile-based entry dashboard with alerts is also the first thing a supplier sees when they login to the platform (and, to complete the tri-fecta, a non-Procurement organizational stakeholder who needs to make a Procurement request, review an RFX, or participate in a supplier development initiative). While simplistic, this is a key feature as you can ensure that supplier or organizational users are not overwhelmed with over-crowded dashboards or 40 menu items they will never use (and likely never understand).

The application is also highly configurable by the client admin who can define the organizational profile and branding, the settings, the certifications it requires from all its suppliers, data-sheet categories, security settings, users and user categories, guides (which can also have an access tile on a main dashboard), default fields for core system objects (requisitions, auctions, supplier profiles, contracts, action plan forms, etc.), supplier onboarding workflow, tags and tag groups, SourceDogg Connect (for ERP and/or organizational data feed pulls), etc. Plus, the SourceDogg team can make additional customizations across the product during implementation and support initial data loads as required.

Finally, they have extensive support guides and courses on their customer web site to help you extract maximum value from the platform. (And those constant iOS/Android action required alerts will dog you through the process of getting things done.) If you’re a SME or MM company looking for a modern best-of-breed S2C (Source-to-Contract) suite (especially in construction/facilities, manufacturing, pharma / health, O&G, CPG, and F&B) to get the job done, SourceDogg is a platform we suggest that you check out.