“We had no idea where our contracts were, what they said, or who had them.”
That’s how Ken Baughman, associate general counsel for global manufacturer Vertiv, describes his company’s contract management situation before it adopted Icertis. Sound familiar?
Manual contract management often leads to contracts becoming siloed by department or geography, sitting on hard drives or shared folders, with no enterprise-wide visibility. Too often in these situations, contracts go unnoticed until create problems like unwanted expiries and renewals or, worse yet, a lawsuit or regulatory fine.
The contract management pain for Vertiv, a global enterprise with $4 billion in annual revenue, was especially acute for two reasons: First, the company had recently been divested from its parent company Emerson Electric, which meant it was now responsible for managing internal systems like contract management. Second, what contract management capabilities it did have were contained within the IBM sourcing solution Emptoris, which IBM has announced it will stop supporting in December of this year.
In short, Vertiv needed a contract management solution, and fast.
A less ambitious organization might have simply replaced the capabilities of Emptoris feature by feature. But Vertiv used the divestiture and the upcoming sunsetting of Emptoris to take stock of the process used to move agreements through the contract lifecycle. With help from Icertis, they studied approval workflows, identified areas for improvement, and designed new, streamlined workflows.
Baughman says Icertis was able to meet the company’s demanding timeline.
With the divestiture, “It was, you’re going to be thrown out on your own, you don’t have any support from us anymore, so be up and running quickly,” he says. “Icertis was able to handle that for us.”
The initial phase piloted with 750 contracts. A year later, the Icertis Contract Management (ICM) platform manages over 9,000 contracts in eight languages across North America, Europe and APAC.
The system has provided global visibility to the company’s contracts. Baughman describes one scenario where the platform has proven its worth.
“If we have a contract with a supplier in the U.S. and it is a global supplier, my team in China can look in the system and say, ‘Hey, we have a contract with this supplier and we can leverage it and use it to our benefit,’” he says.
In addition, Baughman says, the platform is easy to use.
“Me as an attorney, I am not an IT person at all. Icertis has been user friendly. I can get in, navigate through the system and find what I need,” he says. “All my business folks can as well.”
To learn more about Vertiv’s successful migration from Emptoris, check out this on-demand webinar.
To see for yourself how ICM solves the hardest contracting challenges on the easiest-to-use platform, sign up for a demo today.
