Case Study
Contract Lifecycle Management Solution Selection and Implementation Deliver Strategic Value for Global Medical Device Company
A multinational organization in the life sciences industry engaged FTI Technology’s Corporate Legal Operations experts to help identify gaps in the legal department’s software systems and processes. The client requested an assessment of current state of contracting processes and recommendations for a contract lifecycle management solution to improve visibility of contracts and obligations across the organization.
Situation
The organization maintains a lean legal department, which was facing challenges with effectively supporting the business and managing contractual risk due to increasing contract volume and lack of visibility into contracts. Despite the legal department’s efforts to enable business functions and geographic regions with processes, templates and tools to manage contracts, numerous issues had created bottlenecks, lack of compliance with established procedures. These shortfalls created challenges in finding critical information in a timely manner to support transactions and integrate contracts from acquisition activities.
An objective, expert advisor was needed to engage internal stakeholders to identify procedural and system requirements, help standardize processes, and identify opportunities for automation.
Our Role
In the first stage of an ongoing project, FTI Technology led the assessment process, conducting interviews and surveys with key stakeholders to understand the current state of processes and use of systems and advise on necessary procedural changes and system requirements for selecting a global CLM solution. In subsequent steps in the process, FTI Technology is assisting the client with final selection of a right sized CLM solution and prepare the organization for implementation.
With a team of CLM experts who have an extensive understanding of the legal technology market, FTI Technology provided the client with domain expertise throughout the process of evaluating the current state and possible solution providers. FTI Technology also maintained neutrality in engaging with the client’s business functions globally and understanding the issues and needs across each. This objective and thorough assessment, combined with a background in selecting the best CLM solution for the organization’s unique needs, was a strong foundation for future new system implementation to meet existing requirements and support scalability.
FTI Technology provided:
- Conducted workshops and interviews with more than 50 people globally in multiple business functions to understand pain points and common practices across all phases of the contracting lifecycle.
- Additional surveying of dozens of stakeholders throughout the company to gather granular detail on existing procedures and technologies.
- Workshops and surveys were used to set the stage for effective change management.
The goals of the initial assessment were to:
- Establish a standardized and systemized contract process, to enable holistic visibility between legal and each business function so that approvals and operational performance could be reliably tracked.
- Improve visibility between each business function and establish uniformity between how they managed obligations, to reduce risk in contracting.
- Create a single contract repository to improve searching and retrieval of information and to meet legal and/or regulatory requirements.
- Improve consistency in contract repository use across regions with limited governance for managing design and data.
- Enhance interconnectedness across the contracting ecosystem to provide visibility into key contract data and performance metrics.
- Establish governance to better guide and manage the CLM program across the organization.
Reviewing identified issues, FTI Technology provided recommendations to raise the client from “foundational” maturity to a state of efficient contract management.
Our Impact
FTI Technology delivered a plan for the client to enable efficient contracting while effectively managing risk.
Recommendations included:
- Standardized contract processes to streamline operations and mitigate risk, including self-service capabilities.
- Templates supported by technology and to be escalated for approvals.
- Development of a future state technology landscape to integrate CLM with other enterprise systems, enabling access to and visibility of contract information.
- Strategy for consolidating legacy data repositories to create a “single source of truth” across the organization.
- Prioritized and harmonized system requirements and criteria to support selection of a global CLM solution.
- A strategic roadmap, informed by best practices and benchmarks, for implementing improvements to the CLM program while balancing the impact of change on affected stakeholders.
FTI Technology’s assessment and partnership in educating the internal teams about CLM processes and technologies helped the client more carefully consider each stage, determine needs, gain efficiencies, secure business buy in and measure impact.
Wafik Guirgis
Senior Managing Director
+1 (551) 208-5114
wafik.guirgis@fticonsulting.com
Rohit Gulati
Managing Director
+1 (224) 279-7369
rohit.gulati@fticonsulting.com