Source-to-contract redesign for an Australian underground coal producer
The carve-out from a global mining group left the business with a complete procurement governance architecture it had not designed. Standards, delegations, a contract instrument suite and a full set of source event templates all came across intact — built for a multinational with global category teams, layered assurance and a risk appetite calibrated to a much larger balance sheet. None of it was wrong. All of it was built for a different organisation.
The cost showed in cycle time. Contract departures were raised as the primary constraint by every stakeholder group: of the registers examined at the outset, five contracts had taken more than three months to negotiate, and two had run beyond twelve. Where negotiations stalled, the business fell back on purchase orders and weaker protection than a signed contract would have given it.
Beneath that sat specific gaps. One scope-of-work template served every category of spend. A tender process built for large, high-risk projects applied equally to small local suppliers. The delegation of authority set out who could approve a contract but was silent on who could negotiate or concede a departure. And supply chain was not a named risk domain in the enterprise risk framework, despite FOB unit cost risk being rated Extreme and procurement governance and contract management standing as its principal mitigating controls. The client engaged Waypost to right-size the inherited framework to the organisation it had become.
Building a traceable evidence base: Waypost assembled the evidence base over six weeks from more than 37 sources: governance standards, the contract instrument suite, inherited templates, stakeholder sessions across both operations, procure-to-pay data and the departure registers. This produced 147 findings, each mapped to its source and into 11 evidence clusters. Traceability mattered: with several of the structural questions contested internally, every recommendation could be taken back to the session, document or data set behind it.
Quantifying the departure problem: Rather than treat departures as a known frustration, Waypost analysed approximately 300 departure items across nine registers to establish what actually happened to them. A firm opening position saw roughly half withdrawn after the first round; of those remaining, common ground was reached between 71 and 95 per cent of the time, predominantly on the same 10 to 15 recurring clauses. The starting legal position was defensible and appropriately framed for the risk — what was missing was documented guidance on how and when to move from it.
Rebuilding the source event architecture: Waypost built a risk-based triage as the single entry point for all sourcing activity, structured around understanding risk, consequence risk and commercial position risk, with a companion pathway guide for business users outside procurement. The triage output determines which documents activate, so the process scales with risk rather than applying the heaviest treatment by default. The suite itself was rebuilt as twelve modular documents, from sourcing strategy and the request family through to recommendation for award, contract handover and authority to vary, each inheriting what the last established. In parallel, the single inherited scope-of-work template was replaced by eight category-specific templates aligned to the categories the client’s own contract suite already treated as different, each with a companion guide and selected through a short selection guide. The suite was walked through with the procurement principals before release.
Codifying departure positions: Four departure playbooks were built directly from the analysis, covering construction, manufacture and supply, hire and services. Each sets out positions against the clause themes the data showed actually generate departures, using a three-way taxonomy of pre-approved, escalate and reject, with authority levels attached. A recurring departure is answered from a documented position rather than renegotiated from first principles.
The client now has a procurement process that scales with risk instead of applying one treatment to everything. Triage sits at the front as the single entry point, the source event suite is in the hands of the procurement principals and being applied to live sourcing events, and the category-specific templates are with stakeholders for review. The disproportion that made the inherited framework expensive to run has been designed out of the documents themselves. The departure problem is documented rather than rediscovered on each negotiation: the recurring clauses are named, the settlement pattern is quantified, and four playbooks sit with stakeholders ahead of legal endorsement. No cycle-time reduction is claimed — what the engagement delivered is the evidence base and the architecture, and the conditions under which shorter cycles become achievable.
The foundation items sit deliberately with the client. Consolidating the inherited standards into a single supply chain standard, recalibrating the delegation of authority and recognising supply chain as a risk domain in the enterprise risk framework all require leadership decisions and legal endorsement. The 52-action roadmap sequences that work, and Waypost continues to support the client across follow-on workstreams.
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