With price volatility at an all-time high, organizations must be vigilant to control supply chain costs. But across industries, even the most strategic teams are letting contracts lapse unnoticed, missing out on usage insights, or making purchases off-contract—all of which erode compliance, leverage, and budget discipline.
That’s why we’re hosting this session: to spotlight the most common contract management challenges and demonstrate how to fix them using Infor Contract Management.
Join RPI’s Stephanie Marquez, Ayana Brown, and Sasha Delfeus as they explore three real-world examples from the utility, healthcare, and public sectors. They’ll walk through the contract pain points these clients faced, the tailored solutions implemented, and the measurable outcomes they achieved
Session attendees will learn how to:
- Build proactive renewal processes that prevent surprise pricing changes
- Gain visibility into contract-linked usage to support smarter budgeting and sourcing
- Identify off-contract spend and drive compliance with real-time reporting
- Use Infor Contract Management to reduce risk and increase procurement efficiency
- Strengthen communication between procurement teams, departments, and vendors
Whether you’re new to Infor’s contract tools or looking to optimize your setup, this session will offer practical strategies to improve visibility, avoid cost creep, and get more value from every agreement.
Transcript
Ayana Brown
Welcome to another panel discussion by RPI Consultants. Today’s topic is contract management, with a focus on common contract challenges across industries. My name is Ayana Brown. I’m a senior supply chain consultant with over 20 years of healthcare supply chain experience. I’m joined today by two fabulous colleagues, Sasha and Stephanie.
Sasha Delfeus
Hi everyone, my name is Sasha Delfeus, and I’m a supply chain consultant at RPI with five and a half years of supply chain consulting experience.
Stephanie Marquez
Hello everyone, I’m Stephanie Marquez, another one of our supply chain consultants here at RPI. I have about 15 years in the supply chain space, both in healthcare and in custom manufacturing.
We’re really excited to be here with you today. We’re going to explore how Infor FSM CloudSuite helps organizations overcome some common contract management challenges across a variety of sectors. Today we’re going to focus on utilities, healthcare, and public sector county government.
We’ll share real-world issues we’ve come across in our engagements with clients in those various industries, as well as how solutions can be applied regardless of industry. We’ll also talk about some expected benefits and outcomes of those solutions, and we’ll wrap up with questions and answers.
Let’s talk about why contract management matters. Contracts are the foundation of business relationships for the organization, suppliers, and the end users of those contracts. Without proper management of contracts and tracking of spend, there will be impacts to the organization — regardless of industry — such as pricing gaps, overspend, and compliance risk. It’s important to know that contract issues are common across all industries. Clients may have different business processes, but ultimately they often share similar challenges and can be offered shared solutions.
Sasha Delfeus
In contract management, Infor provides delivered visibility into contracts that have expired or are approaching expiration. However, out of the box, the system does not automatically notify end users — including the primary internal contact — of upcoming expirations. This limitation can lead to a variety of issues, particularly for the utility sector and other compliance-driven industries.
Some of the key issues include unintended service interruptions: if a contract with a critical supplier expires without timely renewal, vendors may halt service delivery. This can delay equipment maintenance or supply replenishment, potentially causing service outages and disrupting operations — ultimately impacting customers and the public’s trust. Another risk is financial. Without active contract coverage, organizations may be invoiced at non-contracted or inflated rates for continued services. Missed renewal windows can also result in the loss of negotiated pricing or favorable terms, leading to unplanned financial exposure. Finally, there’s the risk of compliance and audit findings — operating under expired contracts, especially without documentation or an approved renewal path, can trigger internal or external audit findings, violate procurement policies, compromise regulatory compliance, and damage the organization’s credibility with stakeholders.
To address those issues, organizations can implement a combination of delivered tools, configuration options, and process enhancements within Infor FSM. The first thing that comes to mind is Infor Process Automation — or IPA. IPA can be configured to identify contracts nearing expiration and send automated notifications to contract owners, prompting early review or renewal actions.
We can follow that up with a custom list view report in the application. Infor offers scheduled reporting or simply having saved list views configured so that everyone you want to see it can access that report. Those reports can be configured to highlight upcoming expirations and provide visibility for contract managers and sourcing teams, which supports proactive planning.
We can also consider, separately or in conjunction, using Infor Strategic Sourcing along with the Infor Contract Management module to maximize system functionality. Infor allows the creation of a sourcing event from a contract — the user can modify an existing contract and flag it to send the contract lines to the sourcing module. This enables them to competitively resource those goods or services as the contract nears expiration. Suppliers can then review those sourcing events and place bids using Infor Supplier Portal. Finally, the sourcing manager reviews the open bid responses and awards the sourcing event to the supplier with a contract output. The contract output can be awarded as a new contract or used to update the existing contract, depending on what aligns with the organization’s business process. This process ensures continuity while capturing updated pricing or terms.
Alternatively, we can consider resources outside of the application to meet the organization’s needs — such as manual tracking tools. If automation isn’t where you are in the project or the organization isn’t ready to explore it further, shared spreadsheets, online spreadsheets, or other collaborative tools such as SharePoint can be used to track contract expirations and notify resources. These serve as a stopgap solution.
Finally, we can consider process ownership — establishing accountability for monitoring contract life cycles and initiating timely renewals.
Incorporating those solutions into your business process would provide positive results: earlier visibility of expiring contracts, enabling proactive renewal and negotiation; improved reporting and vendor communication, keeping all stakeholders informed; greater control over price increases and market volatility through timely sourcing; mitigation of unwanted automatic renewals, allowing for more strategic and competitive sourcing decisions; and reduced operational disruptions by ensuring contract continuity and compliance.
Given all the different solutions for the risks identified, that tells me it’s not necessarily one size fits all — we’re talking about different industries, different organizations. And from experience, selling those solutions can sometimes be a challenge on larger implementation projects. Folks are often a little apprehensive about change, or they have a difficult time seeing the end result or the vision and aren’t quite sure if it’s going to work with their process. So how is it that you’ve helped mitigate those types of challenges with the clients you’ve worked with?
That’s a good question. It’s important to keep in mind that Infor Contract Management provides a variety of offerings to clients across industries. With that said, we need to consider the client’s experience with the contract management module. We work with a range of clients — some are Lawson S3 power users with exposure to PO25 vendor agreements only. We also work with net-new clients with different offerings in their contract management system. I recommend implementing contract management in a phased approach. In the first phase, you capture the basic use of contract management — establishing supply agreements, establishing service agreements, and tracking spend against those agreements.
Then you can think about a second phase to leverage more of the system’s functionality. This can include implementing Infor Strategic Sourcing, as I mentioned, or utilizing a more technical solution to streamline the client’s process. This phased approach allows the client to feel less apprehensive about change and feel more confident in the system’s capabilities.
Ayana Brown
Great information, Sasha. You’ve mentioned challenges related to expiring contracts in the utility sector — healthcare faces the same challenges, and the solutions you propose would definitely help in the healthcare setting as well. You also mentioned strategic sourcing. In addition to the contract management challenges you discussed, sourcing against existing contracts in healthcare comes with its own unique set of challenges. When suppliers request projected quantities for bidding purposes, healthcare organizations often struggle to provide accurate estimates. Here’s a breakdown of some of the top challenges, why they happen, and a few strategies to mitigate them.
First, we have decentralized purchasing behavior. Different departments — like OR, pharmacy, nutrition, or facilities — often order independently and use different suppliers. To resolve this, one option is to consolidate purchasing data from all departments into a centralized ERP and normalize the spend by category.
Then we have usage data. Item usage data may be inaccurate, missing, or recorded inconsistently, especially if items were ordered under generic or substitute item numbers. Cleansing historical procurement data — say for the past 12 to 24 months — and aligning it with item master data can help. You can also flag substitute items to give a more accurate projection.
Then we have fluctuations in volume. Volumes are unpredictable. There can be seasonal patient surges — here in Southwest Florida, for example, populations significantly increase in the winter months. And there are fluctuations due to pandemics and flu seasons that affect all healthcare organizations. All of these impact item usage. We recommend using historical averages and weighted forecasts, like peak season versus low season, but it’s important to be transparent with suppliers that these are estimates, not commitments.
We may also have some ERP limitations. Infor CloudSuite FSM or other legacy systems may not offer robust forecasting or demand planning tools natively. Infor Birst can assist with that data. However, if Birst is out of scope for your project or not used by your organization, you can also customize the bid forms to capture this information for you.
For one client, for instance, we modified the event header form to include a date range. That date range was used to capture purchase and issue quantities for the event line items and then share the date range and quantities on the bid form for suppliers to see. Suppliers can then provide pricing based on the projected usage, and you can calculate the projected spend for those items with the proposed contract price — which can aid in bid analysis. You can award lines separately, or you can award lines based on the total projected spend for all items. But the quantities provided on the bid form are just estimates.
That leads me to another challenge. Sometimes suppliers want firm commitments. When suppliers request projected quantities, healthcare organizations often struggle to provide accurate estimates, and suppliers may push for guaranteed volumes — especially in exchange for better pricing. Healthcare organizations hesitate due to demand uncertainty or the inability to provide firm quantities for the reasons already discussed. In events, organizations can frame projections as non-binding estimates and consider offering volume tiers — for example, pricing for 10,000, 20,000, or 50,000 units. Here’s an example of an event cover message that simply states: these quantities are provided as non-binding estimates based on past procurement data and anticipated future needs. And as the usage disclaimer on the bottom right states, these figures are provided for informational purposes only and do not represent a volume guarantee. This helps avoid misunderstandings between the healthcare organization and the supplier going forward. By implementing these solutions in the healthcare setting, your procurement team can make more informed decisions and suppliers can offer more competitive pricing.
Stephanie Marquez
I think that disclaimer language is a fantastic idea. I haven’t had an opportunity to use that for any of my clients, but I’m definitely taking note of it. I can see how it would foster better supplier relationships. On the flip side, I’m curious whether in your experience using that type of approach, your clients have ever received pushback from suppliers wanting more solidified estimates.
Ayana Brown
Yes, of course suppliers may want firm projections. But those projections are useful for providing pricing — they’re really no guarantee. You have fluctuations in your history, you may have new projects coming up, so it may be difficult to give firm projections. A great estimate is better than none at all, and remember — a bid is not a contract. What’s legally binding will be ironed out in the final contract output.
Stephanie Marquez
Absolutely. Consistent issues across sectors — and public sector county government is no different. They come with their own set of unique challenges. I recently worked with a client whose primary issue, which we discovered early in the project, was purchases being made off contract. This was contributing to overspend and reducing their negotiating leverage when it came time for those contracts to renew. Something else that was particularly impactful for this client was the compliance risk — potential policy violations, increased costs. We know pricing is really volatile right now, and when purchases aren’t directly associated with a contract, it’s unlikely a supplier is going to proactively offer a lower price.
One of the things we did when brainstorming solutions — and I want to note that the solutions we brainstormed did not solely reside in the system, but also heavily incorporated education for end users, buyers, and department leads and AOU owners — was to work together with the client’s supply chain leads to leverage existing information found in CloudSuite FSM and add it to a specific list view. Here’s an example of that list view.
The list view itself is used for real-time reporting, and it has clear benefits when you can collect information in real time. In this example, it was able to show which contracts were linked to which purchase orders and which purchase order lines. And while we didn’t solely rely on the system, education and training helped promote and enable corrective action — with the department leads, the buyers, and the end users.
This type of report made it easy to see which purchase orders were not tied to a contract. It was this client’s policy that every purchase order needed to relate to a contract — and while there were certainly extenuating circumstances, historically you should find about 95% of them connected. We worked with the client to identify what areas we wanted to add to this existing list view. We included the buyer, so that if a department head or end user was monitoring the report, they knew who to reach out to. In large organizations with big buying teams, it can be confusing to remember who you’re working with. We included the working contract ID, the purchase order, and the PO line. We also included data such as the lifetime contract maximum amount, so that in the list view they could see where they stood against that target. If they were approaching that lifetime maximum, sourcing could step in, reach out to the supplier, and look at whether a change request or change order was needed to add additional funds.
On top of education and training, this approach increased collaboration across departments. This one example is just one of many, but it ensured compliance, supported training, and had a direct impact on reducing overall spend.
And improving collaboration and communication between procurement and the departments — sometimes when we’re doing day-to-day work, we’re honed in on what we have to do and don’t always talk to folks outside our team. Identifying and training on this report helped open up those bridges. It also promoted controlled price increases. We know about pricing volatility, and having these types of controls in place enables earlier corrective action. It seems simple and straightforward, and this is an example of what that report looked like. During end-user training with this specific client, this report was a heavy focus. Through our collaboration with their change management team, we were able to set the tone and let folks know: here’s the benefit of this enhanced report in CloudSuite to give everyone the higher visibility they were looking for.
Ayana Brown
That’s great information, Stephanie. Thank you for sharing that. Looking at this list view you created, I was wondering — did you find that some of the items purchased off contract were actually specials that should have been purchased on contract?
Stephanie Marquez
Yes — and that’s that small percentage that kind of sneaks in there. Our approach during end-user training — and this was also baked into the client’s process — was to train the requesters early on, when they participated in SIT or user acceptance testing and then in end-user training, on where to locate the contract information and how to link it to the requisition. Getting it done earlier on helped reduce those one-off situations where a special was added when it should have been a catalog item.
We also made it easier for the end user by creating a quick link for the requesters to a full contract search. So they knew the contracts they were working off of, and we gave them that list view, made it available from the requester role. This reduced the need to ask, “I have this item — what contract is it on?” and reach out to the buyer or their department head. We gave them the information up front. While it probably still happens occasionally, it definitely doesn’t happen nearly as frequently as it used to.
All right, so in conclusion, we’ve covered quite a bit of information across multiple industries — common contract management issues experienced in utilities, healthcare, and public sector county government. As a quick note: I participated in a panel discussion a few weeks ago, through a contact of mine on LinkedIn, to discuss supply chain challenges. The industries represented were logistics, automotive, and manufacturing. And I’m pleased to report that the common theme across those three industries as well really came down to contracts — called out as the foundation for all organizations, and how to maintain correct pricing in volatile markets, leverage negotiating power, and so on. So while we only covered three industries today, I can confirm that many others are talking about the importance of proper contract management and strategic sourcing.
We do have a few questions. AJ, this one is for you. You’ve spoken about configurations and customizations when describing your healthcare example. What would you say the level of effort is specifically for the item usage and bid analysis customization?
Ayana Brown
List views can be relatively easy to create, as long as the relationships exist between the necessary business classes. However, the development I spoke about for the bid analysis is quite extensive — but RPI can help with that. They just need to reach out.
Stephanie Marquez
What’s one common mistake you see organizations make when forecasting usage for bid events?
Ayana Brown
I would say relying too heavily on PO history alone without validating it against actual item usage or issue quantities. This creates misleading or inflated estimates. For instance, when it comes to inventory items — just because you purchased an item doesn’t mean it’s been used. It could still be sitting on the shelf.
Stephanie Marquez
I’ll take this one if you don’t mind. What are some early signs that purchases weren’t being tied to contracts correctly? I think one of the early signs we noticed — or at least that the customer brought to us during discovery — was discrepancies between the reported contract compliance rates and the actual spend data. We had this gap and started asking, where is this coming from? Once we started digging into the purchase order and invoice details, we were able to see that a lot of these were not linked to contracts when they should have been. It takes very observant team members who have a real passion for protecting the organization.
Sasha, this one is for you. How can process ownership impact the success of contract renewal management?
That’s a good question. Process ownership establishes clear accountability for monitoring contract life cycles and driving renewal activities. When a resource or department is accountable and owns that process, there’s going to be less risk that an expiring contract slips through the cracks. It also fosters better collaboration across departments and enforces the policies established by the organization. If the collaboration is strong and the communication is consistent, I think it’s going to be extremely successful for that organization.
There’s a lot of good information we covered today, and hopefully for those who joined us, we’ve been able to provide some insight and get your wheels turning on how some of these solutions might apply to your organizations. AJ and Sasha, thank you so much. I appreciate your time — it’s lovely to see you both. Since we work remotely, we don’t get to see each other very often, so I appreciate it.
Sasha Delfeus
And if anyone who joined us today has any questions after the fact, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us at questions@rpic.com. Those folks will know how to direct your questions to the appropriate team members. Thank you so much. We hope to see you on another webinar. Thanks, everyone.
