Contract management’s biggest weakness is often not the dealmaking itself, but what happens once the document is signed and everyone moves on. That is the central argument made by Jeff Dean, vice-president of education at the Next Level Purchasing Association, in a recent Corporate Counsel Business Journal article, where he describes a persistent gap between negotiated terms and day-to-day execution.
Dean calls this the “Contract Execution Gap™”: the distance between wh...
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at was agreed on paper and what is actually monitored, enforced and delivered in practice. In many organisations, legal and procurement teams complete their work at signature, only for the operational side to inherit a contract with little active oversight. By the time performance problems emerge, key service levels, rebate obligations or commercial protections may already have been eroded.
The issue is broader than one article or one practitioner’s warning. Digital Journal has reported that businesses can lose around 11% of contract value after agreements move into delivery and ongoing administration, a figure that reflects slow, cumulative failures in governance rather than one dramatic mistake. That kind of leakage is often invisible until budgets tighten, suppliers underperform or savings fail to materialise.
Legal teams are increasingly being drawn into that post-signature phase. Legal Dive has noted that contract value can be particularly vulnerable during cost-cutting initiatives, when organisations focus on immediate savings but overlook whether contract obligations are still being tracked properly. In that environment, the contract becomes less a living management tool than a static record, even though its commercial value depends on consistent follow-through.
Dean’s point is also part of a wider conversation about how procurement itself is changing. In a separate Certitrek profile, NLPA highlighted his work on AI-driven supply chain transformation, underscoring the growing interest in using technology to improve contract and procurement processes. NLPA has also pointed to the rise of autonomous AI agents for tasks such as milestone monitoring and invoice validation, suggesting that the sector is beginning to treat post-award oversight as a workflow problem that can be systematised rather than merely supervised.
That is a significant shift, because the challenge is not just administrative. EY has warned that contracting complexity can obscure profitability, especially when sourcing and technology choices are not aligned with broader business priorities. In practical terms, the more complex the supplier landscape becomes, the easier it is for commercial intent to get lost between negotiation, implementation and renewal.
Dean’s latest intervention lands on a familiar truth for procurement leaders: value is not created at signature, but realised over time. The organisations most likely to preserve that value are the ones that treat contract management as an active discipline, not an afterthought.
Source: Noah Wire Services
