New research from the Hackett Group.

Beyond CLM is the argument, set out in new research from The Hackett Group with Gatekeeper, that contract lifecycle management can no longer stand alone.

It holds that contract management and third-party risk must operate as one connected process, so that compliance, monitoring and AI agents can work across the full lifecycle rather than a fragment of it.

CLM covers the creation, negotiation, execution and renewal of agreements. TPRM covers screening, assessing and continuously monitoring the suppliers behind those agreements. They answer different questions: CLM asks what was agreed, TPRM asks whether the supplier can be trusted to deliver it. Run in separate systems, the two lose sight of each other.

Standalone CLM manages documents well but has no native view of supplier risk. Contracts get signed before suppliers are properly assessed, obligations sit unread in PDFs after signature, and renewals arrive with no record of how the supplier actually performed. The Hackett Group's analysis argues this gap is structural, not a configuration problem.

An S2P suite treats a contract as one step in a buying process, not as a lifecycle to be managed and monitored after signature.Spend Matters research finds that CLM added to an S2P suite still cannot connect contract obligations to live third-party risk, so the same blind spots reappear.

It means contracts and supplier risk share a single data model, so risk assessment informs contract terms, signed obligations feed ongoing monitoring, and supplier performance shapes renewal decisions.

Instead of two systems swapping exports, one continuous record covers intake through renewal. This is the shift The Hackett Group describes as moving beyond CLM.

AI agents can only reason over the data they can see. When contracts live in one system and supplier risk in another, an agent works from a fragment of the picture and produces fragmentary results. A unified data model gives agents full lifecycle context, which is what turns them from a feature into reliable, end-to-end help.

Digital World Class organisations, as defined by The Hackett Group, treat contract management and third-party risk management as one connected process rather than two parallel systems. They standardise on a shared data model, automate the routine execution work, and keep due diligence continuous, which is what lets them stay compliant without adding headcount.

The costs show up in three places: vendor spend lost to auto-renewals, overlapping suppliers and unused services; hundreds of hours per audit cycle spent locating contracts and assembling compliance evidence; and exposure to fines under regulations such as DORA, NIS2 and the CSDDD. For lean teams, the manual workload alone is unsustainable.