Who owns this contract? A one-page way to map ownership across your portfolio
You know that feeling when you walk into a room and everyone goes quiet? That's what happened when I showed a client their top 10 suppliers and asked where the formal contracts were for number two and three.
Their second and third largest suppliers were operating on work orders only. Eight years of reactive maintenance. Millions in annual spend. No contracts. No terms. No performance framework. No exit clause.
They'd asked me to review supplier spend. A visibility exercise. What we found was a governance problem. A catastrophic one.
This happens more often than anyone admits. Procurement functions get isolated. Operations runs parallel. Spend creeps up without anyone owning the full picture. Suppliers become embedded through inertia. When you finally look, the numbers don't match the risk.
The fix starts with one simple question: who owns this?
The one-page framework
Take your top 20 suppliers by annual spend. For each one, map three things:
Who negotiated the original contract or agreement?
Who manages the relationship now?
Who would notice if the supplier disappeared tomorrow?
If those three answers are three different people, you have an ownership problem. If you can't answer any of them, you have a bigger one.
Create a simple one-page matrix. Supplier name. Contract value. Contract end date. Named owner. Escalation contact. Current gaps or risks. That's it. No complexity. No consultant-speak.
This single page does three things at once. It surfaces who is actually accountable. It flags contracts that are missing or about to expire. It forces a conversation about whether your supplier portfolio is managed or just inherited.
A real example
A facilities management organisation had 200+ assets across a national portfolio. When we ran this exercise, facilities managers thought they owned supplier relationships. Operations thought procurement did. Procurement thought the regional teams did. Nobody had actually looked at the contracts.
We found three of the top ten major suppliers with no formal contracts. Two had expired terms nobody had renewed. One had been operating under verbal agreements for six years.
They'd accepted delivery and paid invoices for years without knowing whether those suppliers had insurance, which state they were licensed in, or what the exit terms were.
Once the matrix went on the wall, accountability shifted immediately. Within three months, every supplier had a formal contract and a named owner. The cost of that work was a fraction of what they'd been exposed to.
Why ownership matters
Contracts are living documents. They need someone who knows what's in them. Someone who can spot when a supplier is deviating from terms. Someone who can negotiate price increases or manage performance issues. Someone who knows when renewal is coming.
When nobody owns that contract, you don't have a supplier relationship. You have a habit. Habits cost money. They also carry risk.
What comes next
This exercise takes a morning. A spreadsheet. A conversation with your operations team. The insight is immediate.
If you find gaps, you fix them systematically. You negotiate proper contracts. You assign an owner. You set a review cycle. You embed it into your procurement process so it doesn't happen again.
It's the work we do at QBE Consulting. Assessing where ownership has slipped. Building frameworks that keep it accountable. Helping clients shift from inherited supplier portfolios to actively managed ones.
If your top 20 suppliers are sitting in your head rather than on a one-page matrix with clear ownership, that's a conversation worth having.
