Transforming Contract Lifecycle Management Processes – Construction and Civil Engineering Company

Before:

A Manual and Time-Consuming Contract Management Process

The contracts team understood their need to streamline and standardize their contracting process and enhance post-execution reporting. The existing process was a drain on staff time, involving a lengthy manual process for each contract. Additionally, the lack of automated tools meant that all contracts were vetted manually, making the review process time-consuming and causing delays in decision-making. The company also struggled with maintaining a centralized repository of documents, and the manual handling of approved documents led to disorganized data, further complicating the team’s work.

To address these challenges, the company decided to implement Docusign Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM). On the recommendation of Docusign, they selected Spaulding Ridge to assist with this initiative.

Solution:

Comprehensive Contract Management with Automation and Risk Mitigation

Spaulding Ridge broke down the project into several stages, addressing each of the company’s concerns to maximize the capabilities of their new contracting process.

In the first stage of the project, we set up a centralized repository for their contracts. Next, we implemented their negotiation process within Docusign, allowing the team to track any changes made to documents and identify who made them. This maintained transparency and helped avoid any miscommunication between parties during contract negotiations. Given the volume of contracts handled, contract generation was another crucial priority for the company. We implemented a document generation solution, allowing the company to efficiently process high volumes of new contracts that required customization or personalization by simply filling in specific data for each new agreement. This functionality will save the team significant time.

In the second stage, we further automated the company’s processes by integrating the contracting system with Salesforce to support both the sales and legal teams. This integration streamlined the contract signing process, significantly reducing the manual work involved and providing real-time insights into the status of each document.

To reduce revenue leakage and other risk, we also provided an extensive risk review analysis tracking tool for contracts. This tool streamlined how information about risks was stored and presented to stakeholders who needed to approve taking on the risks. The tool, and the inclusion of multiple approval stages depending on the contract, added multiple layers of security, ensuring that the contract management process was accurately followed.

Additionally, we built various contract templates for Sales/Commercial agreements, Vendor/Procurement/Supply Chain contracts, and NDAs. These templates were further categorized by the specific functions of each section, with customizable fields. All contracts were backed up in a centralized location for easy retrieval, providing the team with a single repository to access their data.