I had a terrible experience with contracts about 15 years ago. I was working at the second biggest telecom company in France, and the CEO asked me to go through thousands of contracts with vendors to save millions of dollars. I spent six months just looking for them in cabinets, reading them one by one, and building Excel spreadsheets. Then I spent months sending Word documents back and forth to hundreds of people to renegotiate these contracts.
It was a nightmare. And I realized something important: no one should have to manage contracts manually. That’s what led me to create Concord.
What’s fascinating is how much contracts have changed since then. The biggest shift? Contracts are no longer Legal’s problem – especially in supply chains. And that’s actually great news for everyone involved.
Why This Shift Is Happening Now
When we started Concord about 10 years ago, contracts were all about legal. Legal teams were managing everything. But this has drastically changed, particularly over the last five years.
At Concord, we work with about 1,500 good companies in the SMB and mid-market world – businesses with 50 to 1,000 employees. And what we’re seeing now is that about 65-70% of our customers don’t even have a legal team anymore. Maybe they have one paralegal, but everything else is outsourced when they really need it.
According to the World Economic Forum, AI is “rapidly reshaping the role of chief financial officers,” offering them new opportunities in automation and data analytics. This is accelerating the trend we’ve been seeing for years.
So, who’s managing contracts now? Operations and CFOs. And there’s a simple reason for this: a contract is not a legal document – it’s a business process.
What a Contract Really Is
Think about it – what is really a contract? It’s not a legal document. A contract is a business process. It’s actually the most central business process you have in a company.
Whether you buy something, sell something, or hire someone, there is always a contract in the middle. And it’s a business process on how to start a relationship. It has nothing really to do with the legal aspect. Legal is part of it, but it’s not what it’s about.
Let me give you a concrete example. More than 90% of the contracts that are signed on Concord have zero negotiation. They’re just getting signed. And that’s the movement we’ve seen for years – more contracts are being templatized, and people understand they’re not going to be able to negotiate everything.
If you send a contract to Salesforce tomorrow, you’re not going to negotiate your contract with Salesforce. I mean, maybe some companies have enough power, but most companies just don’t have the time or the leverage to do this.
How CFOs Are Transforming Contract Management
What’s interesting about CFOs is that we’re seeing right now a massive change in what a CFO is in a company. Twenty years ago, a head of IT was just someone that would help you plug your computer and do some technical support. Today, a head of IT is probably one of the most central roles in your company because it’s about plugging all the systems together.
CFOs are going through the same transformation. Think about it – 10-15 years ago in smaller companies, they were just the accountant guy. This is changing right now. CFOs, because of the tools they have access to, are starting to have a more central role in a company. They’re taking more power.
Contracts are just one of these tools they now have at their disposal. Let me give you a specific example of what we’re doing at Concord: we help our customers understand their financial commitments through their contracts.
When you do forecasting in your company, how do you typically do it? You look at your expenses from last year, you predict some percentage of growth, and that’s your forecast. But what’s interesting about contracts is that you have actual information on what money is coming in and out. You know exactly when, you know how much, you know for how long.
So now CFOs can build forecasting based on actual commitments, not just past expenses. That’s a game-changer.
Why This Is Good News for Supply Chains
According to McKinsey & Company, organizations that fail to digitize their supply chain processes face up to 30% higher operational costs compared to digital leaders. So the stakes are high.
Supply chain contracts managed by operations and finance teams lead to three major benefits:
1. No More Bottlenecks
The traditional method of onboarding new suppliers involves multiple email exchanges, document revisions, and time-consuming approvals. This process frequently stretches from days to weeks. The MIT Sloan Management Review notes that lengthy supplier onboarding is one of the top friction points in modern supply chains.
When you move contract management software ownership from legal to operations, the process becomes much faster. You can standardize templates, automate approvals, and reduce the cycle time dramatically.
2. Better Financial Visibility
For CFOs, one of the biggest challenges in supply chain management is getting accurate, real-time visibility into financial commitments.
When finance teams manage contracts directly, they can extract all financial obligations automatically, allowing them to:
- Create accurate cash flow forecasts based on actual contractual commitments
- Identify opportunities for consolidating vendor spend
- Analyze payment terms across suppliers to optimize working capital
- Flag upcoming renewals with sufficient time for renegotiation
According to the Haslam College of Business, “The CFO role in today’s top companies is often closely linked with supply chain management. The chief financial officer is well-positioned to head off costly supply chain disruptions.”
3. Continuous Monitoring Instead of One-Time Reviews
The reality of things is that traditional contract management meant reviewing contracts once during negotiation and perhaps again at renewal time. Today’s supply chain requires continuous monitoring.
Finance and operations teams want to actively track performance against commitments throughout the lifecycle of an agreement. When they own the contract process, they can put systems in place to monitor compliance, alert them to changes in performance, and identify opportunities for optimization.
What This Means for Your Company
So what does this mean for you if you’re managing supply chain contracts? First, it’s about simplicity. Less is more. At some point, the more features you put in a system, the more access points you have, the more problems you have, the more maintenance you have. It’s a mess.
If you’re still relying on legal to handle all your supply chain contracts, you’re probably creating unnecessary friction in your operations. Here’s what I suggest:
- Focus on templates: Create standardized agreement templates that operations can use without legal review for common scenarios.
- Go digital: Implement contract automation software that allows finance and operations to generate, track, and manage agreements without legal involvement.
- Extract data: The real power is in the contract data. Make sure your system can automatically extract key terms, dates, and obligations from your agreements.
- Start small: Don’t try to revolutionize everything overnight. Start with one category of contracts and then expand to different teams.
The Future: AI Will Accelerate This Trend
AI didn’t create this shift, but it’s accelerating it seriously. The ARC Advisory Group notes that “AI in supply chain automation is transforming procurement, warehousing, and logistics by enabling faster, more accurate, and cost-efficient decisions.”
The first thing AI helps with is removing human risk in the process. When you have human beings entering compliance data, you potentially have issues. Quite often, people forget steps, they don’t upload the document they should have uploaded, et cetera.
The second thing AI is helping with is being able to review big volumes of contracts and really get data out of them. When you have thousands of contracts in a company, how do you know which ones aren’t compliant with your playbook? You’re not going to go through every contract manually. You don’t have the time. So AI helps you get access to the data, access to the information, and then you can act on it.
What I See Coming in the Next 10 Years
I believe the future of contract management is not this complex user experience with a lot of data everywhere – it’s to be able to get you that power with simplicity.
In 10 years, I think there won’t really be contracts anymore – at least not as we know them today. I think they’ll be there, but I think no human will actually review them. I think you’ll see more AI and computers being able to negotiate between them and automate everything.
It’s a bit of a different topic, but that’s the concept behind smart contracts that you can find in crypto, for instance. You’re going to see more of that automation between companies, not tomorrow, but in 10 years from now.
The Bottom Line
For supply chain professionals, the message is clear: it’s time to stop viewing contracts as legal documents requiring specialized expertise. They are business processes that can be standardized, automated, and optimized just like any other operational workflow.
This isn’t just a theoretical shift – it’s happening right now across industries. The companies that adapt fastest will gain significant competitive advantages in terms of speed, efficiency, and financial intelligence.
As we’ve seen with the 1,500+ mid-market companies we work with at Concord, moving contract ownership from Legal to Operations and Finance creates a win-win situation: legal teams can focus on strategic work, while Operations gains the speed and flexibility they need to keep supply chains running smoothly.
At the end of the day, that’s what business is all about – getting things done efficiently. And that’s exactly what this transformation enables.
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Matt Lhoumeau is the co-founder and CEO of Concord, a leading contract management platform used by over 1,500 companies worldwide. With 10+ years of experience transforming how businesses manage contracts, Matt helps finance leaders unlock strategic value from their agreements.
