#ContractManagement

Welcome back to “What Count,” the podcast where information governance meets contract lifecycle management. In this episode, Lee and Maura explore the critical next step after solving your counterparty data chaos: maintaining control of vendor information across multiple systems and teams. Discover how to build a centralized counterparty database that enables operations teams, procurement, and legal to work in parallel—and why enforcing a unique persistent ID is the million-dollar strategy that keeps everything aligned, even before contracts are executed.

Building on our previous discussion of counterparty data complications and contract management challenges, this episode reveals the operational playbook for managing your newly consolidated vendor list. Click the link to listen to our last episode. https://trailblazer.us.com/podcast/counterparty-data-reconciliation-case-study/

Episode length: 00:13:09

0:27 – Introducing today’s topic: preventing counterparty data proliferation

0:46 – Recap: the contract data and counterparty challenges discussed previously

1:05 – The core problem: multiple data sources across teams

9:10 – Pre-contract data collection workflows

10:14 – The “prospect-to-vendor” workflow: collecting data before execution

11:40 – The million-dollar insight: why unique persistent IDs are critical

12:00 – Closing remarks and contact information

What Counts is produced by TrailBlazer Consulting, LLC and hosted by Lee Karas and Maura Dunn. Learn more at trailblazer.us.com or email us at info@trailblazer.us.com. Explore compliance-ready training at the TrailBlazer Learning Academy. Read more from Maura at mauradunn.substack.com. Music by Jason Blake. Full disclaimer.

Most counterparty data reconciliation projects fail at the same assumption: that one identifier — usually a tax ID — can resolve who you’re actually doing business with. In Episode 133 of What Counts, Maura Dunn walks through a real two-year project to reconcile 350,000 counterparty records across eight systems at a company built through acquisition: four contract management platforms, one ERP carrying both customer and supplier masters, and three trading systems, each with its own naming conventions, character limits, and overflow fields. She unpacks the 18 months of unproductive matching that came first, the rule-precedence approach that finally worked once Snowflake and Elasticsearch replaced the spreadsheet attempts, and the 10-to-1 collapse from 350K records down to 35K true entities. She also makes the case for where AI fits this kind of work today — and the one thing it still can’t do unless you put deep institutional knowledge into the prompt. If you want to see what’s hiding in your own shared drives right now, search TrailBlazer Insight in the Microsoft Store — it scans locally for PII, HIPAA, PCI, and other compliance risks with no cloud upload and no IT ticket required.

This episode picks up where Episode 132: Data Reconciliation Before AI left off — Maura delivers the full case study we teased last time.

Topics covered in this episode include post-acquisition contract data cleanup, duplicate counterparty detection across multiple CLM platforms, rule-based data matching at scale using Snowflake and Elasticsearch, and the role of AI in contract data reconciliation when source systems lack consistent identifiers.

Episode length: 00:21:01

0:00 – Pre-roll: TrailBlazer Insight — local compliance scanning for PII, HIPAA, and PCI

0:20 – Show intro

0:47 – Setting up the case study: 350,000 records across 8 systems

1:52 – How growth through acquisition created 7 (then 8) active counterparty sources

3:55 – Why the same legal entity can appear differently in every system

6:22 – The small business analogy: 4 addresses in 13 years

8:09 – The first 18 months: why tax ID matching failed at scale

10:48 – Name matching, character limits, overflow fields, and legacy system formatting

12:41 – Spreadsheet-by-spreadsheet spinning wheels

13:25 – The breakthrough: contract type bucketing + multi-variable matching

15:08 – Moving to Snowflake and Elasticsearch for rule-precedence matching

16:14 – Where AI could accelerate this today — and what it still needs from you

17:41 – The result: 350K records collapsed to 35K true entities

18:13 – What came out of all that work

19:49 – Teaser: next episode covers how to prevent this from happening again

What Counts is produced by TrailBlazer Consulting, LLC and hosted by Lee Karas and Maura Dunn. Learn more at trailblazer.us.com or email us at info@trailblazer.us.com. Explore compliance-ready training at the TrailBlazer Learning Academy. Read more from Maura at mauradunn.substack.com. Music by Jason Blake. Full disclaimer.

Episode 130 – When a company acquires another business, it inherits a tangled web of contracts — each with its own payment terms, clauses, and conditions. Contract one says 30 days, contract two says 45, and contract three says you never have to pay. So what happens when you point AI at this mess? In this episode of What Counts, we explore why contract data governance must come before AI deployment. AI is a powerful governance accelerator, but only when organizations harmonize their terms, configure their systems, and maintain human oversight every step of the way.

Episode length: 00:17:12

Learn more by visiting our website, or by sending TrailBlazer an email at info@TrailBlazer.us.com.