Global Payments Leader Improves Contract Lifecycle Management Processes

Many organizations struggle with replacing legacy contract repository systems that have simply not kept pace with the growing demands of their global business needs. That was the case for this U.S.-based leader in the payments industry. The client’s existing supplier and customer contract repository provided limited contract and supporting documentation visibility and lacked systematic storage capabilities. Contacts also had no metadata, preventing the client from searching and reporting on contracts and creating significant manual work. This impacted the company’s ability to understand and comply with all contractual obligations. Additionally, there were minimal policies, procedures, and processes in place documenting the overall contract lifecycle, including contract development, execution, and administration. Most of this information was considered institutional knowledge within the legal team but was undocumented. The legal and compliance teams had recognized the importance of this initiative, however four attempts at implementing an updated contract repository had failed due to both a lack of project management expertise and inability to understand requirements to design future state processes. Bandwidth to tackle the initiative while still performing daily duties was also a challenge.

Translating the technical requirements

Protiviti was engaged to help the client select and implement a contract lifecycle management (CLM) system. This included project management (PMO) activities, CLM software market analysis, process design and business requirements documentation, legacy contract data extraction, super user training and user acceptance training. By serving as the client’s PMO and primary liaison to the system integrator, we were able to translate the technical requests and requirements of the system integrator (SI) to the business and take on the PMO and implementation work, including change management, that often gets overlooked between a technical SI and the client. Serving as the PMO filled a gap that often challenges many organizations dealing with system integrators. A client will purchase software and assume the integrator will know how to set up the software to meet the client’s needs. However, the client needs to be prepared to answer the question, “how do you want it to be set up?” It is imperative that companies have their system design outlined and know how to get the most value out of the new system. It is not uncommon for good systems to be perceived as failures due to poor implementations when proper upfront design planning does not happen.

In this case, the client did not do a detailed design prior to system selection, so Protiviti played a major role in defining and documenting the process activities, triggering events, business rules, data attributes, reporting needs, and integrations through our Solution Design methodology, as well as standardizing and tagging all contract templates to upload into the system. This was a significant lift that would have otherwise had to have been done by the client to be able to configure and implement the system to their future state business needs.

Solution design is important to ensure the successful implementation of a new software solution. Protiviti recommends that our clients complete this work prior to selecting a software provider to ensure their future state processes and vision are considered during the selection process. While we were able to deliver on the client’s needs, the system selection and implementation would have been faster and more cost effective for the client if solution design was completed first.

How Protiviti helped

Initially, we made the critical recommendation to use a CLM system versus a contract repository to mature capabilities and prevent the need for future system replacement. From there, we: 

• Recommended a CLM system vendor shortlist that satisfied the business needs.
• Facilitated a CLM system request for proposal (RFP) of a CLM system including requirements, demo use cases, vendor meetings, and costing negotiations.
• Served as the client’s PMO arm and primary liaison to system integrator. Translated the technical requests and requirements of the system integrator for the client, removing many of the PMO and implementation burdens from the organization.
• Compared clauses and contract templates across regions for standardization by the client’s legal team.
• Developed and documented business requirements and processes for all contract types.
• Collected metadata requirements for contract authoring and robust reporting.
• Developed an approach and provided a solution for legacy contract data extract and migration utilizing AI (more than 30,000 documents).
• Facilitated development configuration testing and UAT.
• Provided recommendations to further mature capabilities post go-live

Delivering measurable results

A successful client story ends with results that will both sustain our partnership with the client while supporting its mission to innovate and grow customer value. With this project, we:

• Significantly decreased time and resources required to design and implement the client’s new CLM system while providing quality assurance and subject matter expertise.
• Extracted all required metadata and organized legacy contracts and documents for upload into the CLM system using our proprietary tools which provide AI enhanced contract analysis and review
  • Analyzed and organized 30,000 documents and loaded ~19,000 contracts with up to 80 metadata elements each, allowing the system to bring value for both future and past contracts.
• Standardized and streamlined contracting templates and processes across regions and business units, establishing five new contract types in the system with full lifecycle future state process flows for each.
• Identified risks in current contracting process and adjusted processes to mitigate future financial and contractual risks.
• Automated key aspects of the contract authoring process to decrease cycle time by introducing new templates and simplifying author collaboration.
• Consolidated all legal and audit reporting needs and identified metadata to ensure meaningful reporting.
• Set the stage to scale utilization of the system for future contract types and business units including identification over of 50 necessary enhancements in training materials provided by the system integrator.