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Sioux Lookout First Nations Health Authority (SLFNHA) is a nonprofit, community-led health authority delivering health services to Anishinaabe people across Kiiwetinoong in northwestern Ontario.
With roughly 600 staff across primary care, mental health, developmental services and crisis response, dozens of SLFNHA programs depend on hundreds of vendors, suppliers and community partners to keep services running.
A small procurement function sits at the centre of that ecosystem, balancing growing contract volumes with governance, funder accountability and board reporting requirements. SLFNHA was already using Gatekeeper to centralise its contracts and vendor information, but as those demands grew, the team needed the platform to do more.
By moving to Gatekeeper’s new unified plan, SLFNHA gained:
- Unlimited contracts, giving the team more flexibility to manage addenda and related agreements as individual records
- Vendor Performance & Savings capabilities, enabling formal six-monthly vendor evaluations across seven internal teams
- Unlimited Gatekeeper Agents, giving the team more opportunities to automate work against its existing contract and vendor data
The impact is already tangible: one Gatekeeper Agent identified a $7,000 discrepancy in a contract’s financial breakdown before it progressed further in the process.
From contract visibility to a much bigger opportunity
Before Gatekeeper, SLFNHA’s contract and vendor information was spread across spreadsheets, shared drives and individual team knowledge. Gatekeeper gave the organisation a central place to manage contracts and vendors, with renewal reminders and a documented onboarding process.
As SLFNHA’s requirements grew, so did the demands on Procurement. The team needed a better way to manage contract addenda, meet a new Finance requirement to evaluate every vendor every six months, and reduce the manual reconciliation between Gatekeeper and SLFNHA’s accounting platform.
What started as a need for better contract visibility had grown into a broader vendor governance requirement.
Unlocking the full suite of Gatekeeper capabilities
As SLFNHA’s requirements grew beyond contract management, the team needed more from Gatekeeper. In December 2025, the organisation moved from its original model, where the core platform and individual modules were priced and purchased separately, to Gatekeeper’s unified Pro plan.
The move gave SLFNHA access to Gatekeeper’s full Vendor Risk & Compliance, Contract Lifecycle Management and Vendor Performance & Savings capabilities, alongside Gatekeeper AI and unlimited Gatekeeper Agents.
It also removed practical limits on how the team could use the platform, with unlimited contracts, API access, single sign-on and a dedicated technical account manager, while removing the separate annual integration fee.
“Gatekeeper was already working well for our contract management, but our needs were growing. We wanted to do more around vendor performance, integrations, and AI without having to add another tool every time a new requirement came up. Moving to the new plan gave us much more room to grow within a platform we already knew.” Richard Gratton, Contract and Procurement Coordinator, SLFNHA
For SLFNHA, the value wasn't simply gaining more features. It was removing constraints around what the organisation could do next.
Turning a new Finance requirement into an automated process
One of the first examples of that flexibility came from SLFNHA's requirement to evaluate every vendor every six months.
Rather than introducing a separate vendor performance system, scorecards are included within SLFNHA's expanded Gatekeeper platform.
The team built vendor evaluations for each of SLFNHA's seven internal teams. Each group evaluates the vendors it actually works with, with the results feeding directly into the vendor's existing Gatekeeper profile.
That turns a Finance-led governance requirement into a repeatable process built around data SLFNHA already holds.
Vendor performance can now become part of the organisation's wider contract governance. If the required supplier evaluation hasn't been completed, the Finance team can identify it before progressing the contract.
“Gatekeeper has made vendor performance part of the process rather than something we have to manage separately. Every six months, our teams evaluate the vendors they actually work with, and those results sit against the vendor record, giving Finance and Procurement a much clearer view of performance.” Richard Gratton, Contract and Procurement Coordinator, SLFNHA
Scaling contract management without volume constraints
The move also removed the practical constraint SLFNHA had encountered as its contract portfolio grew.
With unlimited contracts, addenda and related agreements can be created as their own linked, reportable records rather than being stored as notes and attachments against an original contract.
That gives the procurement team a complete, traceable record of how agreements relate to one another, rather than critical context buried in notes and attachments. Contracts stop being isolated documents and start reflecting how the business actually operates, structured around relationships, not volume.
The Vendor Portal gives suppliers a direct way to keep their own information up to date, reducing the administrative burden on Procurement while improving the accuracy of vendor data held in Gatekeeper.
Putting AI to work on every contract
Expanding its use of Gatekeeper has also opened up new opportunities for SLFNHA to use AI against the contract data it already holds.
Gatekeeper's Contract Review Agent runs on every contract, automatically populating and checking its financial breakdown.
The Agent has already demonstrated the value of that automation.
On one contract alone, it identified a $7,000 difference between the total being considered and the underlying financial breakdown, allowing Richard to raise the discrepancy before it progressed further.
“Gatekeeper’s Contract Review Agent now checks the financial breakdown on every contract automatically. It has already caught a $7,000 discrepancy that I was able to raise before it went any further. That's where AI becomes really valuable to me; it's doing a real job in the background and catching things that could otherwise be missed.” Richard Gratton, Contract and Procurement Coordinator, SLFNHA
The use case builds on SLFNHA's earlier experience with Gatekeeper AI, which extracted specific clauses, such as governing law and notice periods, from uploaded contracts into searchable custom fields.
The team is now exploring additional capabilities, including Gatekeeper Chat for querying contract data, Enrich for populating empty contract fields from source documents, and custom dashboards that give Procurement and Finance tailored views of the contract and vendor data most relevant to them.
Extending the flow of data between Gatekeeper and SLFNHA’s accounting platform
SLFNHA manages its contracts and vendors in Gatekeeper alongside its financial management system. Today, some information still needs to be reconciled between the two platforms.
SLFNHA is working with Gatekeeper to introduce a native, two-way integration. Once complete, vendor records and purchase requisitions created in Gatekeeper will flow directly into their accounting platform, reducing manual reconciliation and creating a more unified process across Procurement and Finance.
One platform that keeps evolving
SLFNHA operates in an environment where trust, privacy, governance and accountability to the communities it serves are fundamental.
It has deliberately adopted the Gatekeeper capabilities that fit the way its teams operate rather than introducing technology for technology's sake.
That's also what makes the organisation's move to a broader Gatekeeper platform significant. As new requirements have appeared, SLFNHA has been able to extend what it already has.
Vendor evaluations now sit alongside the vendor and contract data they relate to. Addenda and related agreements have room to become their own reportable records. AI Agents can work directly against contract data. And financial-system information is moving closer to the same connected process.
For a lean procurement function supporting a large, community-led health authority, the result is a platform whose capabilities have grown in step with the organisation's governance requirements, without adding headcount.
“We’re a lean team supporting a complex organisation, so we need to make every process as efficient as possible. Gatekeeper gives us one platform where we can strengthen governance, automate more of the manual work and keep expanding what we can do as our requirements evolve.” Richard Gratton, Contract and Procurement Coordinator, SLFNHA
What's next
SLFNHA is continuing to expand how it uses Gatekeeper across its procurement and vendor governance processes.
Its next priorities include developing its community agreements workflow, connecting vendor onboarding more directly with contract creation, and exploring further Gatekeeper AI use cases. The team has also provided early feedback on Gatekeeper’s upcoming RFP/RFQ module.
SLFNHA initially chose Gatekeeper for straightforward contract lifecycle management. Today, it is using the platform more broadly across vendor governance, performance, AI, and Finance, with room to expand its use as the organisation continues to grow and evolve.
