Key takeaways
- Procurement workload is outpacing budget. Rick Gardner shared Hackett Group research showing procurement workload rose roughly 8% last year while budgets grew less than 1%. Contract lifecycle and intelligence is now one of the strongest areas for AI piloting and implementation, with roughly half of organizations already implementing or piloting AI in contract management.
- Buying a CLM is not the same as getting value from one. Toby compared vendor contracts to a gym membership. There is a lot of energy around getting the agreement signed, but if you do not show up for the daily work of managing supplier performance and financials, you don’t see the results you committed to. Roughly half of the organizations Hackett surveyed said their current CLM solution does not meet expectations, well above the typical 30 to 35%.
- The gap is in operationalizing the contract, not signing it. Toby pointed to onboarding suppliers, flowing terms into ERP and source to pay systems, and giving procurement and legal a shared, trusted view of commercial terms and obligations. Without that alignment, value negotiated at signature does not make it to the bottom line.
- Obligations without an owner get missed. Will showed how Ironclad extracts obligations automatically at scale, whether one time, recurring, or conditional (like an SLA credit with a claim window), and assigns an owner to each one. Terms that sit buried in a contract are effectively invisible until someone reads it, and that is where value leaks.
- Renewals need to be proactive, not a scramble. The renewal dashboard surfaces every contract coming up for renewal in the next 90 days, and the renewal brief pulls together a contract summary, likely business owner, savings opportunities, and vendor health signals so a decision to renew, renegotiate, or terminate can be made with full context, not a spreadsheet search.
Interested in seeing how Ironclad can help your team turn vendor contracts into realized savings and risk visibility? Talk to one of our contracting specialists and get a custom demo.
Ironclad is not a law firm, and this post does not constitute or contain legal advice. To evaluate the accuracy, sufficiency, or reliability of the ideas and guidance reflected here, or the applicability of these materials to your business, you should consult with a licensed attorney. Use of and access to any of the resources contained within Ironclad’s site do not create an attorney-client relationship between the user and Ironclad.
