Cequence is helping our company to decrease operational expenses and turnaround time, while increasing the compliance, resource allocation and effectiveness of our contract management.
Customer
Dell Technologies is one of the world’s leading manufacturers of personal computers, network servers, data storage devices, network switches, software, computer peripherals and provides the essential infrastructure for organizations to build their digital future, transform IT and protect their most important asset, information. The company is also well known for its innovations in supply chain management and digital transformation.
Transformation Objective
Contract Lifecycle Management system that would unify and transform contract management after the biggest change in Dell’s history.
The Challenge
In 2016 Dell acquired EMC which was then the largest ever acquisition in the technology sector and resulted in Dell becoming the world's largest privately-controlled tech company. This combined Dell’s enterprise server, personal computer, and mobile businesses with EMC’s enterprise storage business. The merger also meant significant increase of transactions, huge volume of suppliers, and hundreds of sourcing and contract management personnel responsible for buying goods and managing contracts in the organization. “The number of existing contracts with the suppliers doubled basically in one day,” says Martin Guerin, leader of the global contract management organization.
Thus, the company began their search for a new solution that would bring its contract management up to date technologically and would help all departments involved in the process to respond to changes in the fastly developing industry.
At the time, Dell was still relying primarily on a Sharepoint solution for the contract workflow management and workload allocation. This system was not efficient for managing the global complexity of the business. Contracts with suppliers required sourcing managers and contract managers to go through multiple systems and numerous emails without possibility to collaborate in a centralized system. All of that created delays, churn and backlog that took attention away from more important tasks.
The Solution
Cequence implemented a solution that enabled category managers to track their open contracts, execute NDAs or SOWs by using a template from the library or engage legal team and contract managers when necessary. Contract managers received an easy to use tool for collaboration with category managers, a tool that gives them a systematic overview of their assigned contracts and tasks, automated notifications, and full text search allowing users to search phrases in all the contracts in the repository. Procurement leadership received an overview of who is doing what, what are the bottlenecks in their process, reports for better efficiency and a possibility to identify improvements in the process.
Dell made Cequence also accessible to third parties, which only get access to the information necessary to complete their part in the process. “This way we could collaborate with our suppliers directly in the system and reduce the time needed to find the right piece of information”
The Result
In numbers:
49%
Faster to execute the contract
- Streamlined, optimized and visual workflow
- Improved collaboration between managers and other involved parties
- Automation of contract authoring
62%
Better compliance with obligations
- Traceable history of all actions related to respective contract
- Systematic approvals and notifications
- Advanced analytics and enriched reporting
34%
Increased productivity
- Effective management of tasks
- Monitoring of contract status
- Monitoring of internal & external turnaround time
By implementing our transformation solution with the help from Cequence we were able to significantly shorten the contract cycle time which ultimately led to great feedback from business stakeholders and procurement leadership. Management received great reports, insights into the contract management process and the history of supplier contract negotiation. The new tool made it very easy to answer any questions from audit in regard to compliance with company policies which was a time consuming task when we have been using Sharepoint. The team also increased its productivity by removing repetitive manual tasks and contract managers could focus on more value-added activies and projects.
The digital transformation of our contract management proceses was a great success, but we don’t stop there. In cooperation with Cequence, we plan further innovate our processes and we’re working on advanced automation of documents and processes by applying Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning and AI technologies.
Case study – IACCM Innovation Award. Sample: 370 users / 3.400 contracts
