We set the order of operations for how your company buys and signs.
Sequence determines outcome. You cannot assign accountability for a step nobody has identified, and you cannot fix a delay nobody has measured. Most contract programmes fail on that order, not on effort.
How it usually goes
The order that works
Run in this order, a lot of companies find the fourth step is smaller than they expected — or unnecessary.
The problem
Software does not fix a process nobody has written down.
A contract takes six weeks and nobody can say which four of those weeks were waiting. Renewals arrive three weeks before expiry with no alternative prepared. Nobody can produce the approval record for the last five agreements without a day of searching. Somewhere in the business, a supplier is being paid against an agreement that ended last year.
These are not tooling problems. They are the process running exactly as it was never designed to. Installing a contract system on top of that automates the confusion and adds a licence fee.
How we work
Three stages, in order, because the order is the point.
Visibility
How agreements move through the company today — not how the policy says they move. Every handoff, including the ones that live in email. A real cycle-time number to improve against.
Accountability
A named owner at every step, authority set on the full value of what is being committed, and approval evidence you can retrieve in minutes rather than days.
Optimization
Now that the process is visible and owned, fix what is measurably slow — and know precisely what a tool would need to do before anyone pays for one.
Where to start
The Baseline Review
A fixed-fee assessment of how agreements actually move through your company.
Two to three weeks. A defined scope, a fixed price agreed before it starts, and a decision you can act on at the end of it.
- Your process mapped as it runs, across intake, approval, contracting, onboarding and payment.
- A baseline cycle time, taken from your own executed agreements.
- Your process scored against a 37-point operating model, phase by phase.
- A findings report a CFO reads in ten minutes — what it is costing, ranked by consequence.
- A sequenced plan: what to do inside thirty days, inside ninety, and after that.
Fit
Who this is built for.
A good fit
- 200 to 1,000 employees, $50M to $500M in revenue
- Enough contract volume that weeks of cycle time cost real money
- One person — usually the CFO or COO — who can decide
- No mature procurement function, or one person carrying it alone
- A contract system being considered, bought, or already underperforming
Not a fit
- Looking for a legal opinion or contract drafting — that is your counsel's work, and we stay out of it
- Looking for someone to select and implement a platform
- Wanting a report rather than a change
Independence
We have no software to sell you, so "don't buy anything yet" is advice we can afford to give.
Stone Gate takes no referral fees, holds no reseller agreements, and has no implementation practice waiting at the end of the assessment. If the answer is that your process needs work and your current tools are adequate, that is what the report will say. It is the only position from which the first recommendation is worth anything.
Independent advisory · Contract lifecycle, sourcing and agreement execution