The "Zombie Spreadsheet" of Contract Performance

In heavy industry, the Quarterly Business Review (QBR) is theoretically a strategic milestone—a chance to shake hands, review performance, and discuss the future.

In practice, it is often a week of administrative hell.

The friction stems from a massive disconnect between the Rulebook (the contract) and the Scoreboard (operational reality). Contract managers often find themselves in a quarterly panic, trying to prove they met the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) locked inside a PDF, using data that is scattered across three or four different systems.

To build a simple performance presentation, teams are forced to:

1. Open the contract to find the specific KPI target (e.g., "98% Uptime").
2. Log into the finance system to find billing data.
3. Log into the CRM to find relationship history.
4. Scrape through site diaries, emails, and spreadsheets to find the actual daily records.
5. Manually stitch it all together into a new, static Excel file.

This is the "Zombie Spreadsheet." It is a dead document that teams have to brutally resurrect every three months just to prove compliance.

The Great Disconnect

This workflow highlights the biggest lie in contract management: The belief that signing the contract is the finish line.

In reality, the moment ink hits paper, the contract often becomes a ghost. It gets filed away in a repository, while the actual work happens in finance software or on the job site.

• The Contract holds the Rules.
• The Operations hold the Score.

If there is no bridge between the Rules and the Score, you aren't managing a contract; you are manually arbitrating your own reality. You are wasting high-value hours building "Frankenstein" presentations to retroactively prove you did your job.

The "Feed the Beast" Methodology

Solving this doesn't necessarily require a six-month IT integration project or complex API builds. The solution is often remarkably low-tech but high-leverage: Just move the data stream.

Most modern operational systems—whether for finance, asset management, or CRM—can trigger notifications when specific events happen. A payment is late. A machine goes down. A milestone is hit.

By simply auto-forwarding those event notifications into a contract intelligence platform (like Hevi), the gap closes instantly. Instead of a quarterly archaeological dig for data, the contract system is "fed" the operational reality in real-time.

Suddenly, the "Zombie Spreadsheet" stays dead. The data is live.

• The Contract says: "Penalty applies if downtime exceeds 4 hours."
• The System receives: "Alert: Asset #402 Offline - Duration 4.5hrs."
• The AI connects the two: "Alert: KPI Breach detected. Validate against contract scope."

Stop Presenting, Start Validating

The goal of a performance review shouldn't be to argue about what happened based on a spreadsheet someone manually typed up the night before. The goal should be to review a validated, single source of truth that has been tracking the score in real-time.

If you are still manually cross-referencing site diaries and finance exports against PDF clauses, you are working for the contract. The contract should be working for you.

Let the software graph the downtime. Let the AI catch the late payment. You just show up to shake hands.

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