Learn how a leader in the chemical industry leveraged Weagree’s contract automation capabilities that resulted in 10x more contracts.
Or more explicitly: automating contracts saved 2½ hours per contract, which results in response time (delivery of the first draft) from 3 days reduced to 2-6 hours. This improved process doubled the number of contracts they created year over year for three consecutive years.
Ten times more transactions anchored in writing – with no need to increase the team size (thanks to automation). Furthermore, a significantly increased compliance level and high adoption rate of a process/workflow improvement.
The context
The contracting team had an in-depth insight in their past performance: the time to create a contract took them between 3 and 4 hours, and therefore, the response time for creating a contract used to be two or three days. They knew precisely how many contracts the team created and managed annually. Their in-house-developed contract creation tool proved unsustainable and after benchmarking contract automation solutions in the market, they selected Weagree.
A historic response time of two or three days might not sound problematic (and indeed, it may not be a ‘problem’). But ‘not a problem’ was not necessarily what their internal clients thought.
The challenge
The contracting team did not perceive a challenge: they simply measured all sorts of performance and all sorts of time spent. Inevitably, they measured their contracting process steps. Where everyone in an organisation is focused on process improvement, productivity improvement and added value to core business processes, also the metrics of legal operations will appear on the radar.
Typically, a contracting team manages maintenance projects for multiple manufacturing plants. For each plant, hundreds or thousands of suppliers are required to deliver on time – all with strict deadlines, protocols, procedures and security requirements. The purchasing agreements related to such a shutdown were voluminous (regularly exceeding 100 pages each) and manual work time-consuming and error-prone. In a chemical company, mitigating risk, strict compliance with procedures and process optimisation are both crucial and part of everyone’s day-to-day work.
The requirement
While the contracting team continuously streamlines all its processes and is permanently looking to automate amount of work to reduce response times, improve document quality, and ultimately achieve higher productivity for the entire team.
Solution: Automation
Weagree was selected as the partner of choice, ready to implement contract automation and breathe new energy into their operations.
To accelerate their implementation, we developed template import tooling to automatically migrate their existing contract templates into Weagree. During later years, this tooling was further expanded in connection with:
- Weagree’s functionalities for AI-automated contract review (enabling an automated conversion of third-party originating documents),
- Registering signed PDF-contracts in Weagree CLM (enabling full-text search and automated file indexing, using AI-data extraction), and
- Tooling for migrating a CLM, CRM data or entity management data and files.
To simplify their day-to-day operations, Weagree automated their contract workflows minimising manual work. Automating all of the work meant eliminating unnecessary friction for faster contract creation, therefore shorter response times (time to deliver the requested documentation) and enabling their internal clients to focus on higher-value tasks.
The result
By automating the entire contracting process, the contracting team:
- Increased team productivity: Now tailoring a document takes up to merely 25 minutes, not hours or days anymore. The contracting team’s productivity soared to new heights.
- Improved response-time: Thanks to the productivity improvement, response time reduced from three days to merely 2-6 hours. Tailoring a contract in 25 minutes can be done the same day, in between other appointments. Such significant improvement in response time is not feasible if (regardless of complexity) creating the contract takes several hours. Such efficiency gain is a game-changer, enabling the team to swiftly address requests and keep operations running like a well-oiled machine.
- Created 10x more contracts: The automation that reduced response times (thereby) sparked a significant increase in contracts created. For three consecutive years, the number of documents created doubled each year, resulting in ten times more documents overall.
For companies focussing on process/workflow optimisation: More contracts created from the latest template-versions (and anyhow a contract being in place) increases compliance. Contracts created through contract automation controlled by a central contracting team (as opposed to reworked previous-deal examples by a plant or project manager) leads to process or workflow maturity with a high adoption rate.
Bonus results
As the response times reduced so significantly, the creation and management of contracts across the 40 chemical plants became centralised, providing the contract managers with a single platform for creating and managing their documents. This streamlined the entire contracting process, minimising confusion and ensuring everyone worked harmoniously towards a common goal.
Automation guaranteed that contracts were consistently formatted (professional look & feel) and always contained all the necessary information, mitigating the risk of errors. No longer did contract managers have to fret over missing details or discrepancies. Instead, they could focus on their core responsibilities with the utmost confidence.
Their maintenance of templates received a much-needed boost. Automation ensured at all times up-to-date templates are used, aligned with the company’s evolving suppliers-related security and safety requirements. This simplified the process of creating new contracts and reduced the potential for errors or outdated information.
Last but not the least, the translations of RFQs (for bidders requiring another language) is delivered quick and accurate by reusing the Q&A-answers of the first template. This is thanks to Weagree’s projects functionality; creating the same document in another language takes a few minutes only.
Conclusion
By embracing innovation and automation, this chemical giant was able to accelerate their day-to-day contracting. Weagree’s solution enabled the team to streamline operations, improve response times, boost team efficiency and improve overall contracting processes.
