Eight versions, one signature
Storing isn't the same as being able to find.
On a Tuesday morning a supplier calls the facility manager: the cleaning contract was automatically renewed two weeks ago. It was in the clause. The manager hangs up and starts searching. On the shared drive there are eight versions, in three different folders. Two are scans with no searchable text. One is called “final” but isn’t signed. One is called “old, do not use.” Two days later the signed version turns up as an attachment to a sent email from his predecessor in 2022. With that clause in it. The clause that, he had been led to believe, was taken out at last year’s renegotiation.
Contracts are a peculiar information problem. Not because they get thrown away, but because they get stored ten times over. The signed version sits as a scan in the DMS, as a PDF on the department drive, as an attachment in four mailboxes, and as a Word draft in a project folder. Annexes live somewhere else. The correspondence about the amendment to article 7 sits in an email thread that nobody archives. Among all those copies there is one version that counts: the one with a signature, a date and binding force. Which one that is, usually only the person who signed it knows. And that person leaves at some point.
The real problem isn’t the duplicates, it’s the near-duplicates. Eight versions of the same contract with small differences: an amended penalty clause, a different term, an addendum that’s in version six and not in version seven. Which one was approved? Which is a draft that circulated by accident? IDC estimates the cost of a lost document at €290 to €580. For contracts the loss is an order of magnitude bigger — a missed termination window that renews a contract for another year, a dispute with no supporting evidence, an audit that grinds to a halt. The default response is to build a contract register, in Excel or SharePoint. That works as long as everyone fills it in dutifully at the moment of signing. In practice three out of twenty departments do. After a year the register is half-filled and no one trusts it any more.
Our platform doesn’t start from the register; it starts from what is actually there. Every storage location is indexed and tagged with metadata. OCR makes old scans searchable on party name, date, amounts and clause text. Applied to the logic and conventions of your organisation. Contract types are recognised and linked to suppliers, clients or procurement categories. Master contract, addenda, annexes and the corresponding correspondence are tied together by content, not by folder structure. Visual and semantic deduplication reduces eight versions to what matters: the signed original, and the current amendment. The rest stays traceable — as a draft, a copy, a piece of history — but no longer shows up in the search result.
The facility manager would have had his answer in five minutes instead of two days. More importantly, this is what remains after the exercise. The next time someone looks for a contract, checks a termination window, or has to deliver a dossier for an audit, it no longer starts with calling round. It starts with a search on a supplier. The same applies if you want to know which contracts are coming up for renewal — that’s easy to surface too. And one version that says: this is what applies.