From demand to signature, in one place

Fourteen months after the award, finance asks a simple question. Brindlewood bid €148,000 a year for maintenance. Why does the contract say €184,000?

Somebody retyped the bid into a Word template and swapped two digits. The approver signed off the wrong figure, and the purchase orders have been raised against it ever since. Each step was done properly. The mistake happened between two of them, where a person had to carry the deal from one system to the next by hand.

Fratera runs the whole route in one place: demand, sourcing, a risk and due-diligence assessment of the winner alongside the redline, approval, signing and the life of the contract.

1. Demand

It starts with a request from the business. Say facilities wants new contractors for cleaning, security and maintenance across three sites. The request comes in through a demand intake workflow that you configure, with the questions and routing your organisation uses.

When the demand needs competition, you continue it into a tender. If you have already collected a few quotes on an offers sheet, you can continue that into a tender instead. Either way, the tender starts from work already done rather than from a blank form.

2. Sourcing

The tender can be an RFI, an RFQ or an RFP. Existing suppliers and new prospects get a link and a one-time code, with no account to set up. Each section of the questionnaire goes to the colleagues who know it, their scores combine into one team view, and a score heatmap puts every supplier against every section before you award. Q&A answers go to every bidder anonymised. Our e-sourcing article covers each of those steps in detail.

What sourcing hands on is the award. From it, Fratera creates the contract pre-filled with the awarded supplier, prices, currency, dates and yearly value schedule, one contract per winner. When Corvalo wins two lots and Brindlewood wins one, you get two contracts and nobody typed either of them.

3. Risk and due-diligence assessment

Winning a tender does not make a new supplier safe to sign. Fratera runs a risk and due-diligence assessment of the winner, and supplier onboarding, as workflows you configure to match your own policy. The assessment runs alongside the redline, so legal doesn’t wait for the questionnaire to come back.

Brindlewood came into the tender as a prospect, so Fratera doesn’t know it as a supplier yet. A step in the onboarding workflow adds it. The assessment result then sits on Brindlewood’s 360 view, with its contracts, spend and documents, where anyone looking at the supplier can see it. The next steps, and the next renewal, start from there.

4. Redlining

Suppliers rarely sign your paper unchanged. More often their lawyers send back a Word document of their own. Fratera redlines the supplier’s Word document: an AI check compares it with your own clause library, so the clauses that stray from your standard wording show up, and then every change gets its own decision, one at a time. None of them goes through because somebody skimmed past it.

Because the contract already holds the awarded prices and dates, legal can spend the round on the terms rather than on checking the numbers against the bid. The agreed text is what goes forward to approval.

5. Approval

Once the terms are agreed, the contract goes for approval, routed by your delegation of authority. It reaches the people whose authority covers it, not whoever happened to be copied on the e-mail. A contract inside a category manager’s limit doesn’t wait in the finance director’s queue, and one above it doesn’t slip past.

What they approve is the contract itself: the supplier, prices and yearly value schedule from the award, and the terms as decided in redlining. Nobody has retyped the figures into an approval request, so the approver reads the same numbers the supplier bid.

6. Signing

After approval, the contract goes for e-signature on Fratera’s own signing engine. Both sides sign, and the signed contract comes back as a sealed PDF, so the file on record is the one both parties signed. When an auditor or a supplier’s new account manager asks for the signed version, there is only one to find.

You don’t export the contract to a separate signing tool and upload the signed copy again afterwards, which is the point where signed contracts tend to go missing. The signed contract moves straight into its life as a managed contract.

7. The life of the contract

Signature is where the contract starts working. In Fratera it carries its renewal and notice dates and its obligations, and it appears on the supplier’s 360 view alongside that supplier’s other contracts, spend, risk and documents.

Purchase requests become purchase orders against the contract. When the notice date on Corvalo’s cleaning contract comes round, the decision to renew or re-tender starts from what is already in Fratera, not from a search through old inboxes.

What one place gives a buyer

Every handover on that route used to be a retype or a forwarded file, and every retype was a chance to get the deal wrong. With every step in one place, the numbers in the contract are the numbers in the winning bid, because they came from it.

It also means you can answer the question that comes a year later. When someone asks why Brindlewood got the maintenance lot, the team’s scores, the heatmap, the moderator’s reasons and the signed contract are in Fratera rather than spread across four inboxes. The Sourcing edition, with e-sourcing and collaborative redlining on top of everything in Pro SRM, is live and on the normal 14-day trial.