The Supplier We Forgot We Were Still Paying

The promotion nobody warned me about

When they made me operations lead at the distribution company where I had worked for six years, I thought the hard part would be the warehouse. I knew the warehouse. I had come up through it, from a clerk checking manifests to the person who eventually ran the floor, and I understood pallets and routes and the particular chaos of a Friday afternoon dispatch better than I understood anything else in my life. So when the owners handed me the wider role, over in our offices in Pinetown, just outside Durban, I was quietly confident. I was wrong about where the danger was. The danger was not on the floor. It was in a cupboard.

The company had grown fast, faster than its systems, which is a sentence that could describe half the businesses in the country. We had suppliers for everything. Vehicle tracking, fuel cards, pallet wrapping, uniforms, the coffee machine, the alarm, the cleaning, insurance of about six different kinds, software licences I had never heard of, maintenance contracts on equipment that had in some cases been scrapped years ago. And all of these relationships, every single one of them, was governed by an agreement that lived somewhere. The trouble was that somewhere turned out to mean a lot of different places, and mostly it meant nowhere at all.

What I found when I went looking

My first week in the chair, I asked a simple question. I wanted to know when our main vehicle tracking contract came up for renewal, because I had an idea we were overpaying and I wanted to renegotiate it. Nobody could tell me. Not the finance lady, who had the invoices but not the agreement. Not the owner, who remembered signing something once but not the terms. Not the previous person in my role, who had left and taken whatever lived in his head with him. The actual contract, it emerged after a day of searching, was a printout in a lever arch file in a cupboard, next to a lot of other printouts, some of them current, some of them expired, some of them belonging to companies we no longer even dealt with.

I spent the better part of two weeks doing nothing but archaeology. I went through that cupboard, and the shared drive, and three separate email inboxes, and a drawer in the owner's office, trying to assemble a picture of what we were actually committed to and until when. It was genuinely frightening. We had agreements that had auto-renewed for years that nobody had looked at. We had at least one where the pricing escalation clause had been quietly ratcheting up our costs well above inflation because no one had diarised the review window. And then there was the cleaning company.

The invoice that was the whole lesson

The cleaning company was the one that made the owner go pale. Buried in the finance records was a monthly payment to a contractor for cleaning a satellite depot. The thing was, we had closed that depot. Not recently. We had closed it, consolidated everything into the main site, and moved on, and nobody had ever cancelled the cleaning contract for the building we no longer occupied. The agreement had an automatic renewal and a notice period, and because no one was watching it, it had simply rolled over, year after year, quietly taking money out of the business to clean a building that was not ours to clean, for a period I was too embarrassed to say out loud at the time.

It was not a fortune, in the scheme of a company our size. But it was the principle of it that landed. We were a business that prided itself on tight margins and knowing our numbers, and we had been bleeding money for years purely because our agreements lived in a cupboard and a few people's memories, and memories leave when people leave. The owner asked me, in a meeting I will not forget, how many other invisible leaks like that one we were carrying, and the honest answer was that I had no idea, which was exactly the problem. You cannot manage what you cannot see.

Deciding to stop running on goodwill

I went home that weekend and thought hard about it. The instinct in a company like ours, a practical, hands-on, unglamorous business, is to fix things with more effort. Put someone in charge of the cupboard. Make a spreadsheet. Set reminders in a calendar. I had actually started building exactly such a spreadsheet when I realised I was about to recreate the same fragile situation in a slightly tidier form, because a spreadsheet lives in one person's head and one person's files just as surely as a cupboard does, and the day that person leaves, you are back to archaeology.

What we actually needed was for the agreements themselves, and everything about them, the dates, the terms, the renewal windows, the notice periods, the responsible person, to live in a system that did not depend on anyone remembering to look. I started reading about proper contract management software, which until that month I had assumed was something only enormous corporates with legal departments ever bothered with. The more I read, the more I understood that the size of your company is not really the point. The point is whether your agreements are visible and whether the important dates come and find you instead of you having to go and find them.

Watching the fog lift

We brought a system in over the following couple of months. I will not pretend it was instant or effortless, because the first job was loading everything we had unearthed into it, and that was tedious work. But something shifted in me as we did it, because for the first time I could see the whole shape of what the company was committed to, laid out, searchable, with the renewal dates no longer a mystery but a list of things the system would warn us about before they arrived. The idea that a tool could manage the entire arc of an agreement, from the day it is signed through every renewal and review and eventual end, what the people who do this for a living call contract management lifecycle software, had seemed abstract when I read about it. Watching it actually catch a renewal six weeks before it happened, so that we could decide on purpose instead of by default, made it very concrete.

The vehicle tracking contract, the one that started the whole thing, came up for renewal a few months later, and this time the system flagged it well in advance, and I walked into that renegotiation knowing exactly what we were paying and exactly when I had leverage. We cut the cost meaningfully. That single saving more than covered what the whole change had cost us, and that was before you counted the cleaning contract I had already killed, and whatever other quiet leaks we had sealed without ever knowing their full size.

What I tell the new people now

I have been in the operations chair for a while now, and I have had to hire and train people under me, and there is a conversation I have with every one of them early on. I tell them the cleaning company story. I tell them that the most dangerous risks in a business like ours are not the dramatic ones, the breakdowns and the accidents and the lost loads, because those announce themselves and everyone rushes to deal with them. The dangerous ones are the silent commitments that run in the background, that cost you a little every month, that nobody is watching because watching them was always somebody else's vague responsibility.

When people ask me what changed, I say that we stopped trusting memory. A good business, especially a growing one in a tough market, cannot run on the assumption that the right person will happen to remember the right thing at the right moment, because people move on and memories go with them. Finding sensible contract management software in South Africa was not, in the end, a glamorous project, and I have never once mentioned it at a braai. But it is the thing that let me sleep, because I no longer lie awake wondering what else is hiding in a cupboard, quietly costing us money to clean a building we walked away from years ago.