Potential savings of €600,000: How NUMA structures its international contract management

Challenges

International complexity without a uniform contractual basis

Contracts were scattered across various systems and storage locations. Documents were stored in Google Drive, OneDrive, on local hard drives, and in other individual repositories. As the number of locations and contract types grew, it became increasingly difficult to reliably find relevant information and categorize it correctly. What had worked on a smaller scale became increasingly impractical as the company’s international presence expanded.

Deadlines and extensions were difficult to plan

Notice periods, renewals, and renegotiations are among the details that can easily get lost in a fragmented contract landscape. If this information isn’t recorded in a structured way, it often doesn’t come to light until there’s little room left to maneuver. This is precisely what led to situations where contracts had already been renewed in some cases before the next steps had even been discussed internally.

The Legal Department has become the operational information center

Where is the contract? What is the deadline? Who is responsible? Does this policy apply to another location as well? Questions like these were regularly directed to the legal department. Instead of retrieving information directly from a system, staff had to search for content, organize it, and pass it on to other teams. In an international organization with many stakeholders, this extra effort quickly became an operational bottleneck.

Solutions

This relieves the legal department of the burden of handling inquiries

NUMA has centralized contracts in ContractHero and made them directly accessible to the relevant teams. Thanks to full-text search, filters, and clear contract assignments, relevant information can now be found quickly. Access rights ensure that each person sees only the contracts that are relevant to their own area of responsibility. This significantly reduces the workload on the legal department, as there is no longer a need to request information centrally. Contracts, deadlines, and responsibilities can be tracked directly within the system. This reduces the need for follow-up inquiries and creates greater transparency in day-to-day operations.

Deadlines and responsibilities are actively managed

For NUMA, it was crucial to stop managing deadlines and responsibilities in individual files, folders, or people’s heads. In ContractHero, this information is stored directly within the contract and linked to reminders. This makes it clear early on which contracts are due for renewal, where action is needed, and who is responsible internally. This provides NUMA with a more reliable foundation for its day-to-day operations. Decisions can be prepared sooner because relevant information no longer has to be painstakingly gathered first.

A global rollout instead of isolated local solutions

ContractHero helped NUMA clearly map the company’s international structure within a single system. Thanks to its multi-tenant capability, countries, teams, and responsibilities can be clearly separated, while access is tightly controlled. At the same time, the dashboard provided a clear overview of which contracts had already been entered and where information was still missing. This created a unified foundation for all 14 countries.

NUMA demonstrates how contract management can be systematically implemented even within an international and rapidly growing organization. The key was not merely the introduction of a system, but the establishment of a standardized contract framework, clear processes, and a working method that functions across 14 countries.

Using ContractHero, NUMA has migrated more than 5,000 contracts from decentralized repositories into a centralized and robust structure. Especially at this scale, this creates the transparency needed not only to manage contracts more effectively but also to steer them in a more economically targeted manner. For NUMA, this made it clear which contracts required action, where renegotiation was needed, and where concrete savings potential lay. On this basis, NUMA was able to identify potential savings of €600,000.