Bird’s-eye Vision for Post-Signature Contract Management

The contract is signed. The deal is done. For many organisations, this marks the end of a long procurement journey – but for Dominique Kindt, CEO & Founder and Koen Vercauteren, Head of Product Management of WITH and its digital platform Birdseye, it's precisely where the real work begins.

WITH was founded in Belgium in 2014 by a team with over 50 years of combined experience in strategic sourcing, vendor management and contract management consulting. By 2018, however, a pattern had emerged that would transform their business.

"The key word is frustration," says Dominique. "As consultants, we were typically involved in larger deal-making types of consulting. We were invited then four or five years later to renegotiate."

The scenario repeated itself: clients who had invested heavily in procurement were coming back dissatisfied with suppliers. But when the WITH team examined the contracts, they discovered the real problem.

"You look into the contract and you say, well have you done this? No we haven't. Have you done that? No we haven't. Have you claimed this obligation? No we haven't," Dominique explains.

"So you see that contracts were not consumed, not executed, the value was not consumed."

This realisation led them to develop Birdseye, a platform specifically for post-signature contract management. The solution began as Sourcing Cockpit in 2018, evolving through an AI-enabled Contract Scanner in 2022, CATS CM certification in 2023 and formal European expansion in 2024.

Why post-signature management matters

The problem, according to Koen, is a fundamental misunderstanding about what happens after signature.

"Time and time again we see that somehow people expect that after the signature is done that everything goes automatically as planned," he says. "And this ignores a basic truth:. things change. Certainly in this day and age it goes faster and faster."

The assumption that a signed contract will automatically deliver value for years is no longer realistic. Post-signature contract management encompasses risk management, financial management, stakeholder management and tracking obligations.

When organisations want to implement these processes at scale, they discover that good people and processes alone aren't enough.

"Without the supporting technology it becomes very hard to scale," Koen explains. "That's where Birdseye comes into play to help you automate these kind of processes."

Birdseye's approach starts with contract classification. "Not every contract or deal requires the same attention, nor does it require the same amount of activity to be done," Dominique explains. "And so it is that one size fits all that is killing contract management because not all contracts are the same."

The platform automates process flows, reminding contract managers what they need to do and when, differentiated by contract type and strategic importance.

European ambitions

Birdseye's growth strategy centres on partnerships with firms like BDO and local consulting experts. "We do not believe that the contract management platform Birdseye by itself is a silver bullet to solve all problems," Koen says. Partners provide crucial customer intimacy and multidisciplinary perspectives that technology alone cannot replicate.

Looking ahead, the company wants to expand across mainland Europe through sustainable, partnership-driven growth. "We want to be, let's say, the European alternative because there's quite a bit of American power behind our competitors," Dominique says.

They're also strengthening end-to-end contract lifecycle management capabilities, integrating with procurement systems, contract building tools and e-signature platforms. But perhaps the most pressing driver is the changing regulatory landscape.

"More and more organisations need to comply, have audits and need to be able to show to regulators how they are doing business, that they're in control," says Koen.

As Dominique puts it: "You get a contract signed, it lives for five years, nobody looks at it, you can hardly say you're in control."

That's the gap Birdseye is built to fill – ensuring organisations can demonstrate control over contracts throughout their entire lifecycle, not just at signature.