A leading European luxury goods company leveraged Weagree’s contract automation and CLM solution to streamline the creation, organisation and coordination of e-signing 375 intra-company agreements amongst 70 legal entities worldwide.
The context
The company manages a vast network of 70 subsidiaries worldwide, each of which work under a complex web of intra-company agreements that cover vital operational areas such as global supply, logistics, distribution, and local supply chains. Each agreement is unique, influenced by varying regional laws, transfer pricing mechanisms, product categories, trademarks and jurisdictions.
Our project highlighted in 2 minutes:
Historically, managing these agreements was a highly manual and time-consuming process (involving 0.5 FTE). As the business grew and the assigned team members quit their job all too frequently, the need for a more efficient, scalable solution became increasingly urgent to keep up with the complexity and volume of contracts.
The challenge
Creating and managing 375 intra-company agreements across 70 global subsidiaries posed a significant challenge. For many years, it involved over 800 hours of manual labour annually – equivalent to half a full-time employee’s yearly workload (who would quit their job every other year or earlier). Organising each agreement with its own intricacies, from transfer pricing arrangements to regional legalities, made the process both complex and prone to errors.
Without an efficient system in place, the renewal process was slow, resource-intensive, and challenging anyhow to manage at scale. The company needed a solution that would significantly reduce the time and effort involved, while maintaining high levels of accuracy, compliance and control over (the metadata in) their 375 intra-group agreements.
Weagree's solution
By utilising Weagree’s advanced automation and contract lifecycle management (CLM) capabilities, we automated the entire workflow – from creation, with easy validation of metadata, to bulk e-signing and management of all 375 intra-company agreements. The entire process of managing the entire portfolio of ‘countless’ intra-group agreements was transformed into an efficient, streamlined operation.
We are excited about projects of this type as they use many great Weagree functionalities accelerating contracts, in particular:
- Importing all data into Weagree using our CLM migration tooling (we received a spreadsheet).
- Inserting the templates, merging the data and generating the 375 agreements.
- Bulk e-signing all the agreements (and monitor e-signing progress).
- Maintaining overview over all project tasks (and follow-up timely).
- Reporting towards the future
Here’s how we did it in more detail:
Check and ‘re-engineer’ the spreadsheet data for all the to-be-generated documents such that all the intra-company agreements can be bulk generated with the right data and details at the right Q&A question.
All contract entries to be given a unique contract description (which is for convenience of working with your overview pages – it enables you to find back certain contracts by searching on the description).
Verify the ‘375 contracts’ in the spreadsheet to establish if:
- review all Q&A-fields to establish if all contracts are likely to generate correctly;
- all data were indeed well-inserted (for each contract type, to check the Q&A answers of one single contract entry);
- check legal entity data: legal entity details, board appointments and function titles, e-signing authorisations.
Adjust Weagree’s legal entity management (as appropriate, add additional fields).
Import:
(a) the legal entities with address and other corporate details,
(b) the details of the signatory-officers (and their respective function title for each entity).
This part of the work can be skipped almost entirely in any subsequent years.
Insert the templates for the three intra-company agreement, including the questionnaire.
- For the Q&A-elements, create meaningful tag names;
- If the three templates use the same parameters, then use one single Q&A field;
- For multiple-choice questions, make sure all answer options are provided for.
For each of the three templates, when generated, check if they look as expected: contract house style to be fine-tuned.
The above implementation work (which accounts for most of the 69 hours in the first year) can be skipped or minimised in any subsequent years.
Create a project where all the intra-company agreements will be collected:
- for each of the three templates, add one contract entry;
- for each of the three templates, click Export Q&A;
- match the to-be-migrated data with the exported Q&A fields;
- import the migration data into the project (click Import Q&A).
If Weagree’s SharePoint integration is activated and configured, all contracts will be stored on the SharePoint site and in the SharePoint folder path indicated for that project. Configure as appropriate.
Using Weagree’s contract reporting to validate for each of the three contract templates if all Q&A answers have been populated correctly. (Rather: if not correctly, certain data will not show up – so ‘errors’, if any, are well traceable). Cross-check this metadata report against the ‘375 contracts’ in the migration spreadsheet to establish if all contracts are correctly generated (verify all Word-contracts).
If an API-integration is implemented, this time-consuming metadata validation work can largely be skipped.
Double-check: go through each of the three questionnaires, whether all Q&A-question are answered (by simply clicking Next > Next > Next, etc.) the three red dots turn into a green check; this will also be green-checked on the project overview page.
Select all contract entries within the project, and click Generate Word (or Generate PDF). Go for a coffee: it may take a few minutes.
For all generated contracts, in the template settings of the three templates, we adopted a document-naming convention, with a file-naming pattern to be best recognisable outside Weagree or DocuSign (especially useful if the SharePoint integration is active).
Activate and configure the DocuSign plugin.
Result:
- all e-signing to be initiated and monitored from within Weagree;
- all emails to the e-signatories to be sent by DocuSign;
- e-signed contracts will return automatically into Weagree and are automatically marked e-sign-completed.
Weagree’s integration enables to keep track of arrears (and to follow up to the relevant persons).
Start all the e-signing transactions from the project overview page. Note that all e-signing sessions can be started one-by-one:
- Write a standard ‘personal note’ for the e-signatories for in all e-signing messages (to be sent by DocuSign).
- How to start depends on where you are: If on the project overview page, select the contract entries to be e-signed, and click E-sign button. The rest is probably self-explanatory. If on a contract properties page (for an individual contract entry), click the DS button on the top left.
- In the popup, select the right e-signatory: prefilled if there is only one. Click Next, and copy-paste the personal message (and adjust it as needed). The message will appear in the DocuSign email that the e-signatory will receive.
E-signing runs!
Since not all of the 30 executives across the group are likely to e-sign (within a week or so), Weagree not only offers reporting widgets to quickly spot them, but also enables to have DocuSign send them a reminder. If one or more of the executives would change position within the group (or leave employment), Weagree enables to have DocuSign ‘void’ the related e-signing transactions.
Monitor the progress of each transaction stage on the Tasks-kanban (the task will be on the status Awaiting input column), as well as on the user’s dashboard My Wizard (in the widget, per five – click the widgets Go-to icon to have the full overview).
Oversee all tasks in relation to each contract entry from within the project on the page Tasks (depending on who was assigned to be involved, go to the subtab My colleagues on this Tasks page).
Because the Kanban-view maybe cluttering insight or oversight, consider switching to the Table view (switch is in the upper right corner).
A Task will automatically appear on the Kanban in connection with each ‘contract stage’ (creation of a contract entry, generating the document, starting e-signing, being e-signed), or automatically disappear once completed.
To work conveniently with the Kanban, we have assigned a default Task-status per contract stage (so depending on the stage, it will show up in a different Kanban-column).
Create a default task-description that will help you browse through the hundreds of tasks that will start jumping around. Clicking on a Task will bring you into the contract entry, which should enable you to do what needs to be done from there.
Create a CLM contract sheet, where all e-sign completed contract entries can be moved to. All contract data (Q&A-answers) will automatically be mapped on the correct CLM fields.
On the My signed contracts subtab: manage all contracts. (If any follow up were needed, the notification for such contract can be configured under the Bell (the square bell icon on the upper left).
The result
Weagree reduced the effort required to manage intra-group agreements by up to 1,159%. In subsequent years, the process improvement will become even 5,000%.
The setup minimises or excludes the risk of errors. Weagree automated boring routine tasks, provides more control over intra-group contracts and real-time insight in the e-signing process of large volumes of contracts.
Weagree accelerates the intra-companies contract administration work – time spent from 800 hours reduced to 69 hours only (first year) or 16 hours (following years).
