How to Achieve Award-Winning Operational Efficiency with Contract Management

Sometimes, not only does the software do what the vendor claims it will, but it does so to an award-winning extent! Here’s a Contract Management success story from Agiloft

While all vendors claim to save you time and streamline business processes, claims don’t always turn into real solutions. That could be because of a clunky or ineffective product, failed software implementation, poor user adoption, or all of the above. But sometimes a customer and vendor collaborate to create an innovative solution with real-world results that improve the lives of users as well as create significant business value for the organisation. In almost every instance, this success is due to a complete project buy-in from the customer and the software vendor.

This was the case with Williams Lea Tag (WLT) and Agiloft. They worked together to automate WLT’s supplier onboarding with the Agiloft’s Contract Management Suite.

The Company

With 10,000 employees and 45 locations spread across 6 continents, WLT is a powerhouse of marketing and communications services. The company’s acquisition-based growth strategy resulted in a stronger, smarter, more versatile offering for WLT clients. But with each acquisition, the operational complexity multiplied. Standardised processes across the organisation became convoluted. Every minute spent trying to unify and streamline manual business practices was a minute taken away from WLT’s core objective.

The Challenge

“We were looking for something that allowed us to build the structure we had in mind,” WLT Governance and Supplier Analytics Manager Max Elvey said. “It’s not complexity for complexity’s sake. Our suppliers are our business at WLT; it’s incumbent upon us to have a fitting system. With the acquisitions, more rules came in that impacted our business, particularly depending on where the supplier was based. We needed to take all these different components that we were developing and boil them down into an unambiguous system with advanced metadata capabilities. We selected Agiloft for that system. None of the other options reflected what we were trying to create, nor did they offer the configurability.”

The Project

Development within the Agiloft framework began in September 2017 and went live in April 2018. The team consisted of WLT Commercial and Governance Analyst Matthew Poulson, Max, a US-based colleague, and an Agiloft implementer. The team designed their workflows so the burden of onboarding suppliers was fully absorbed and regulated by the system. The system issued the contract followed by a series of dependent workflows that managed risk—inclusive of audits and surveys. Critical information like insurance certifications and supplier requirements were also collected and tracked by the solution. Once the supplier had completed their assigned task, all the payment details initiated within the same centralised solution.

The Results

With the new system in place, WLT accelerated the on-boarding process for new suppliers from two to three weeks to a few hours of operational time. The software also automated WLT’s supply chain management, which increased transparency, strengthened relationships, and ensured consistency in operations while dramatically increasing governance and auditability. The solution’s scalability empowers WLT’s acquisition strategy and enables collaboration across the globe, which has allowed the company to increase from 2,000 to 5,000 vendors with minimal disruption.

To add to the project’s success, WLT earned the IACCM Innovation and Excellence Award for Operational Improvement at this year’s IACCM EMEA conference, and Max was there to receive the award on behalf the entire project team.

“We are delighted to have won the IACCM award for Operational Improvement for our supplier onboarding and audit system. Using Agiloft afforded us the flexibility to be able to render a series of highly contingent processes into a cohesive whole, without the requirement for additional resources,” Max said. To read more about WLT’s win, read the release here.

Agiloft’s no-code platform gives businesses the power to realise value by automating complex processes without having to write a single line of code. Click here to learn how you can automate your most complex business processes with Agiloft’s highly configurable Contract Management Suite.

This article was originally published here. It has been reproduced with kind permission.