Key Takeaways: Taking Control of Contracts in Higher Ed
A recent Unimarket panel discussion brought together two practitioners with very different vantage points on contract management: Leeann Lemon, a Contract Specialist in Procurement Services at Marshall University, and Adrian Furner, Executive in Residence at World Commerce and Contracting with more than 30 years of experience in complex commercial transactions. The conversation was candid, practical, and grounded in the realities facing higher education institutions today.
From this candid conversation, six key themes emerged to help guide your journey to better contract management in Higher Ed:
1. The Leakage Problem Is Bigger Than Most Institutions Realize
Adrian opened with a number that tends to get CFO attention: contract value leakage averages between 8.6% and 9.2% across organizations. For a university with significant annual spend, that represents a material budget exposure. And most of it is not the result of bad negotiations. It happens after the contract is signed, through fragmented storage, low adoption, missed renewals, and off-contract purchasing that nobody catches in time.
Leeann reinforced this from the ground level at Marshall University. Agreements scattered across email threads, shared drives, paper files, and departmental desktops. Real knowledge of obligations and renewal dates end up in individual inboxes or locked in institutional memory. When an audit arrives or a renewal window closes, procurement teams scramble rather than act strategically.
2. Fragmentation Is an Operating Model Problem
Contract management is often treated as a storage problem. It is so much more. It is a cross-functional operating model problem that spans procurement, finance, legal, and every department that touches a supplier relationship.
Higher education portfolios include a wide range of agreements: complex, high-risk contracts covering capital projects, technology, and research services alongside high-volume operational categories like facilities, housing, and supplies. That mix creates uneven demand, and most teams are expected to manage it with fewer resources than ever.
The downstream impact is predictable. Departments source similar needs independently. Spend splits across multiple contracts. Suppliers get duplicated. Compliance issues tied to solicitation thresholds or cooperative purchasing requirements go unnoticed until they become audit findings.
Procurement becomes a help desk answering the same questions on repeat: Do we have a contract for this? Who is an approved vendor? What are the terms? That reactive work displaces higher-value activity like supplier consolidation, proactive renewal planning, and performance management.
3. A Single Source of Truth Changes What Is Possible
The solution our experts kept returning to is a simple one; a shared, intuitive system that makes contract information accessible and usable across the institution.
When stakeholders can quickly see what exists, including scope, term, pricing structure, and renewal dates, procurement shifts from reactive to strategic. Departments can “self-serve” as purchases route through existing agreements and not through one-off purchases. This is where compliance gains and savings show up: fewer redundant suppliers, more consistent terms, and a clearer path to primary and secondary supplier models with stakeholder buy-in.
Visibility also strengthens audit readiness. When contract and spend data are connected in one place, an institution can demonstrate what it originally agreed to, who approved it, how it is being used, and whether spend is flowing through the right channels. That is a very different posture than hunting across systems to piece together a paper trail after the fact.
4. Connect Contracts to Spend Data
One of the more practical points from the webinar was the value of linking contracts to real-time spend. When those two data sets are disconnected, significant manual effort is often required to reconcile information across systems.
Consolidating supplier spend under existing agreements unlocks volume-based pricing and simplifies renewals. Institutions can identify where spend is leaking outside contracted channels and act on it. In turn, that level of visibility gives procurement more leverage when renegotiating terms because the institution can demonstrate actual usage and value.
5. Baseline Before You Build
Both panelists agreed on the starting point: map the current state before designing a future one.
That means documenting the contract process end-to-end, measuring cycle time, identifying compliance gaps, and quantifying leakage. Prioritize improvements by stakeholder value and supplier segmentation rather than trying to fix everything at once. Not every agreement needs the same workflow. High-risk, high-value contracts require deeper governance and active performance management. Routine purchases should move faster with standardized paths.
The internal case for investment should be built on operational truth. Translate improvements into metrics that resonate with leadership: faster cycle times, fewer handoffs, improved audit readiness, and measurable savings from consolidation and reduced leakage. That is a compelling story for a CFO, especially when paired with the 9.2% leakage benchmark.
6. What Success Looks Like
Progress within twelve months is visible in day-to-day behavior. Stakeholders know where to find contract information instead of emailing procurement. Teams consolidate fragmented agreements into master structures. Departments collaborate using data that is accessible and trusted rather than guessing what exists.
To wrap up...
Contract management maturity is a direct lever for financial performance and operational control. A single source of truth, clear lifecycle ownership, and adoption-focused design reduce leakage, improve compliance, and increase supplier leverage. The goal is an enterprise capability that is simpler to use, easier to govern, and consistently tied to measurable outcomes.