Challenge
Vaillant, a family-owned business with over 17,000 employees, specializes in heating, cooling, and hot water supply solutions.
As such, the company has an extensive network of suppliers who provide the components needed to manufacture its products and other products and services. Managing the contracts that underpin these relationships was a serious pain point for Vaillant’s leadership. Highly manual processes and workflows led to inefficiencies and delays, while the inability to easily trace contracts and relevant documentation created operational risks. Contractual deadlines, obligations, and risks were sometimes discovered late or went unrecognized, resulting in missed opportunities and increased exposure.
Additionally, Vaillant struggled with a low level of standardization and fragmentation of data. Their limited capabilities for searching, reporting, and monitoring contracts hindered their ability to maintain control and visibility across the entire contract lifecycle.
"We had very high manual efforts and manual processes around the contracts,” Rabea Pohl, Head of Legal Operations & Technology, says. “We had limited overview about obligations and risks stemming from the contracts, which can be quite threatening. It was a problem."
Solution
To transform how it managed contract operations and tracked their performance, Vaillant turned to Icertis. The company chose Icertis due to its ability to handle contract processes enterprise-wide, which centralizes contract data for superior insights and increases control over contractual risks.
Contract reviewers from legal, finance, and other departments are involved at the appropriate stages to ensure contracts are thoroughly vetted, while preventing unnecessary work from overloading the teams. Icertis also offered Vaillant a robust API framework that enables them to integrate their contracting processes with other enterprise systems.
Integrating Icertis with SAP’s Master Data Hub allows for real-time data synchronization for supplier information, which ensures consistency in supplier data. After a successful proof of concept, the future includes integration with SAP Ariba sourcing further connecting contracting processes.
Vaillant also connected Icertis to DocuSign for seamless electronic signing and Microsoft Word and Outlook for contract editing. Finally, the company was not only able to bring new contracts onto a single platform, but it also digitized and migrated around 5,000 legacy contracts and documents with 1,500 suppliers onto the system.
"We now have one repository, one single source of truth for our purchasing department, which is great, Our migration happened parallel to configuration," Rabea says.
Benefits
Today, Vaillant has the contract data visibility, flexibility, and performance assurance it needs to continue delivering on its vision to “take care of a better climate …inside each home and the world around it”, as Rabea states.
There is one digitally enabled and integrated contracting system. Contracts are executed faster, and business leaders have enhanced visibility to reduce risk and improve agreement terms.
Rabea notes that the speed and visibility Icertis has injected into their contract operations will have impact on company performance. “We want to increase profitability, and Icertis helps with that,” she says. “You can grow the revenue by closing more deals in less time, and you can realize cost savings when you have very good contract management.”