Before building anything, we spent a few months talking to people who actually manage supplier contracts at growing UK manufacturers and distributors. We wanted to understand the real workflow — not the idealised version, not what the CLM software vendors describe as "best practice," but what actually happens on a Tuesday afternoon when someone needs to check whether a supplier can raise prices next quarter.
The conversations were illuminating in a way that confirmed our intuitions but also corrected some of them. Here's what we found, drawn from three procurement leads at companies with between 150 and 280 employees. All three are based in the UK Midlands and North. We've used anonymised descriptions rather than names.
The baseline: what most mid-market manufacturers are actually working with
None of the three teams we spoke to had dedicated CLM software at the time of our conversations. All three relied primarily on a combination of shared drive folders (SharePoint or Google Drive) and some form of spreadsheet tracker. One team had a field in their ERP system for contract end dates, but the field was inconsistently populated and not connected to any alert or calendar function.
Team sizes ranged from three to six people in the procurement function. In each case, the team was responsible not just for contract management but for the full procurement cycle — sourcing, tendering, purchase order processing, and supplier performance. Contract review was one task among many rather than a dedicated function.
The most common answer to "how do you know when a contract is due for renewal?" was some version of: "We have a spreadsheet, but honestly we rely a lot on whoever signed the contract remembering to flag it." One lead described a system where the person who negotiated each contract was supposed to set a calendar reminder for 90 days before expiry. "It works until they leave," she said. "Then it's just gone."
What a contract review actually involves, step by step
When a renewal is coming up — when someone has remembered to flag it, or when the supplier has proactively sent a renewal notice — the typical process involves locating the original signed contract, reading through the relevant clauses, and making a decision on whether to renew as-is, renegotiate, or look for alternatives.
Locating the contract is not always trivial. At one of the three companies, contracts were stored in a folder structure organised by supplier name, but naming conventions had changed three times over eight years, and signed versions were sometimes in email attachments rather than in the shared drive. Finding the right document could take 15 to 45 minutes for older contracts.
Reading through the relevant clauses was described in all three cases as largely manual and unguided. None of the teams had a standard review checklist. The approach was: open the contract, search for the word "renew" or "price" or "notice," read those sections, form a view. For a standard 20 to 40-page commercial agreement, this typically takes 45 minutes to two hours depending on how the contract is drafted and how clearly the relevant clauses are labelled.
The depth of review varied significantly based on contract value. A £5,000 annual facilities contract would typically get a quick check of the renewal date and a scan of any price change language. A £250,000 logistics contract would get a more thorough read, possibly with the Finance Director or external solicitor involved. This tiering made practical sense but meant that mid-range contracts — say £30,000 to £80,000 — often received only superficial review because they weren't large enough to trigger the heavier process but weren't small enough to wave through either.
Where the process breaks down
Three consistent breakdown points emerged across all three conversations.
The first was handover gaps. When a procurement manager left or changed roles, the contracts they managed typically had institutional context stored only in that person's head — which suppliers were difficult, which clauses had been waived in practice, which renewal conversations needed a specific person on the supplier side. The spreadsheet captured dates and values but not context. New team members were reviewing contracts without knowing what mattered.
The second was amendment tracking. All three teams described contracts that had been amended by email or informal letter of agreement, with those amendments not reliably attached to or cross-referenced with the original contract in the shared drive. One lead described discovering, during a renewal negotiation, that a price cap they thought they had agreed two years earlier had actually expired after 12 months — a fact that was in an amendment buried in an email folder rather than in the main contract document.
The third was clause complexity in supplier-drafted agreements. When suppliers provide their own standard terms, the drafting often uses language that is technically clear but practically opaque — clauses that reference other clauses that reference schedules that are attached as separate documents. A procurement team without legal training (which is almost all of them) is often unsure whether they've found all the relevant price change provisions or whether there's something in an appendix that interacts with what they've read in the main body.
What "good" looks like in practice
The team that had the most robust process had built it around a single anchor habit: every contract was reviewed by two people, and the second reviewer had a specific list of things to check — renewal date, notice period, price escalation terms, liability cap, and exit provisions. The list had been built up over five years of contract disputes and near-misses. It wasn't comprehensive, and it wasn't automated, but it was consistently applied.
That second-reviewer habit had caught several problems that would otherwise have passed unnoticed. A fixed-percentage escalation clause that had been drafted at 5% when the original negotiated position was 3%. A supplier that had substituted their standard terms for the agreed mutual terms in the final signed version (not maliciously, just a version control error, but the commercial effect was different). A notice period of 120 days in a contract the team had been managing as though the period was 60 days.
We're not suggesting the two-reviewer approach is the answer for everyone — at smaller procurement teams, it's not always feasible on routine contracts. The point is that the consistency mattered more than the sophistication. A basic checklist applied every time was more reliable than a thorough ad-hoc review applied sometimes.
What this told us about what to build
The common thread across all three conversations was not "we need smarter analysis." It was: "we don't have time to read every contract carefully, and we don't have a reliable system for knowing which ones need attention right now." The bottleneck was attention and prioritisation, not analytical capability.
That's what shaped how we built Atira's renewal workflow. The output isn't a report that requires someone to read it thoroughly — it's a structured view of which contracts have approaching notice windows, what the key commercial terms are in each, and what's changed since the last review. The procurement team still makes the decisions; we just make sure the right information is surfaced before the decision point passes.
The amendment-tracking problem is one we're still working on properly. It's harder than it looks because amendments range from formal signed addenda to email exchanges that have contractual effect but aren't formatted like contracts. Getting that right for the full diversity of how mid-market companies actually manage their agreements is one of the more interesting problems we're sitting with currently.