HARMAN Scales Contracting Across the Enterprise with Icertis

Challenge

Manual processes limited scale

HARMAN designs and manufactures consumer and professional audio products, automotive electronics, and connected audio systems. With more than 26,000 employees across 126 locations worldwide, contracting plays a critical role in supporting the company's global operations and business relationships.

For Suzanne Dinsmore, Director of Legal Operations and Contract Management at HARMAN, improving the speed and efficiency of contracting has always been a business priority.

A workload analysis conducted by HARMAN's legal team revealed that approximately 12 full-time employees were spending their time managing contracts through largely manual, inbox-driven processes. For a legal organization of just 50 people supporting a 26,000-person enterprise, that level of effort limited the team's ability to focus on strategic work and act as a proactive business partner.

As contracting volumes increased across the organization, HARMAN needed a more scalable approach—one that could reduce manual effort, create consistency across business units, and provide greater visibility into agreements across the enterprise.

"Contracting touches on every aspect of a business and it becomes an integral part of the work that we do. Being able to make it faster and more efficient is a key driver for the work that I do every day," says Suzanne.

Solution

Standardizing contracting across the enterprise

HARMAN selected Icertis to create a single source of truth for contracts and establish a consistent, scalable contracting process across the organization. What started as an initiative focused on commercial agreements has expanded into a broader enterprise-wide contract management strategy supporting more than 1,000 users, over 30 contract types, and thousands of agreements across the business.

Through standardized templates, automated workflows, and self-service contracting, employees can generate approved agreements quickly while maintaining consistency and governance. Today, 85% of new procurement and commercial NDAs are processed through Icertis, helping ensure consistent use of HARMAN's standard terms and improving lifecycle oversight. Process adoption continues to grow, with more than 5,000 contracts now processed through Icertis, a 74% year-over-year increase.

By centralizing contracts and contract data, HARMAN has also created a foundation for greater visibility across the organization. Teams can search and analyze agreement language, identify trends, respond more quickly to business questions, and gain a broader view of contractual relationships across business units.

"We made sure to empower the business. We have templates in the tool that are self-service. If they don't deviate from the standard, the contract is created and can be sent for signature within a matter of minutes," explains Suzanne.

Benefits

Faster execution with greater visibility

By standardizing and centralizing contract management, HARMAN has built a contracting operation that scales with the business while improving responsiveness for both legal and business stakeholders.

The transformation has delivered measurable improvements in contract execution and operational efficiency:

• 5,000+ contracts processed through Icertis, representing 74% year-over-year growth in platform adoption.
• 82% reduction in average legal review turnaround time for routine contracts, reducing review time to 0.52 days and helping accelerate agreement execution.
• 10x faster NDA execution through automated workflows and self-service capabilities.
• 85% of new procurement and commercial NDAs now processed through Icertis, improving consistency, compliance, and oversight.

The benefits extend beyond efficiency gains. When HARMAN's sales legal team recently needed to identify agreements containing tariff-related language, the contract management team was able to search across centralized contract data, quickly compile the relevant agreements, and provide actionable information within a day. In the previous fragmented environment, that work could have taken days or even weeks.

For Suzanne, the real value lies in the visibility that centralized contract intelligence brings to the enterprise. By connecting contract information across business units, teams can access information faster, identify trends more easily, and make better-informed decisions. Suzanne shares, “The key to this is that they have speed, visibility at scale across the entire organization."