CLM 101: How ETS built an A+ contracting process

Laurie Longo has worked with Educational Testing Service (ETS) since the early 2000s, and throughout that time, she’s worn many hats. As Laurie navigated through different roles, responsibilities, and departments within ETS she found herself as the newest member of the Contract Operations team in March of 2020. If that date sounds familiar, it’s because her new position started just before those day-to-day duties of many of our jobs would change forever.  

Assessing a need 

ETS, an organization many of us can thank for the standardized tests we took in grade school, is a global education and talent solutions company that has worked to promote the power of learning for more than 70 years. As COVID swept the nation, Laurie, and the rest of her contracting team, experienced what felt like a sudden and overpowering spotlight on the pitfalls of their current contracting process.  

“I live close to the [corporate] office, so I actually volunteered to go to the office once a week or so to get mail and the physical contracts we needed,” Laurie said, “I’d literally go through someone’s desk to try and find [a contract] because they only had the new version on their desk. We knew we needed a new [contract lifecycle management (CLM) tool), but this was the jump start to say, ‘Okay, we need to figure out something quickly because we’re in trouble.’”  

Choosing a contract management tool 

Even though she was new to the contracting team, Laurie’s knowledge of the company put her at the forefront of the CLM search. Laurie asked her team to look past improving the current loose, disjointed process and instead focus on their dream end state, in a perfect world.  

From there, the ETS team worked to create their ideal CLM workflow, being sure to include all the custom fields that made their organization unique. Working within both the education and non-profit spaces, ETS knew the ability to have customization, and flexibility was a must in their new CLM software. Another requirement for their new solution was the ability to create and share reports on different elements within the system – a feature severely lacking in their legacy technology. Finally, as ETS found itself at the very beginning of their global expansion journey, the organization wanted to ensure that their new CLM could integrate directly with some of their other foundational technologies like Salesforce, DocuSign, and both their ERP and payroll platforms. The ETS contracting team knew they were looking for a platform that could handle immediate issues, but also be prepared to support them through their plans to expand globally. 

Now that the contracting team had their ideal future process flow, it was crucial that they receive broader support for their initiative. Thanks to Laurie’s history at ETS, she knew there were more stakeholders to involve in the process. So, Laurie gathered members from her procurement team, IT, and operations to ensure a truly comprehensive solution would be chosen and implemented across the organization. But what was the deciding factor in ETS’ selection of Agiloft? Interestingly, ETS’ General Counsel already had an instance of Agiloft up and running for a very specific compliance workflow. So, even after evaluating other CLMs in the market, ETS chose Agiloft.  

As Laurie explained: “Agiloft really had everything we wanted and everything we were going to need in a future state, and they were already high on our list as a partner.” 

An integrated process  

While many CLM users build their new instance, workflow, and repository over time, before a singular roll out or process change, that’s not the only way to do it. ETS knew Laurie scouring the office for physical contracts every few weeks wasn’t sustainable. So, they decided to break their Agiloft implementation down into a phased approach, tackling the most pressing issue first: a contract repository.  

Laurie and the team worked through more than 60,000 documents related to more than 200,000 records in their old system and decided what exactly should or needed to be moved into Agiloft in addition to the physical records in their office.  

After records were transferred and made accessible by the appropriate parties, ETS focused on the process itself. As mentioned, the legal department was already using Agiloft separately for compliance tracking, so Laurie centered her efforts around vendor management and onboarding. By working to set up those important integrations at the beginning, the team could now focus on creating a new, seamless onboarding process.  

Today, the ETS contracting team and its surrounding business units have an automated vendor onboarding process that takes important vendor information out of emails and into a single system — removing several steps in the overall workflow. And, while the ETS team is getting closer and closer to their ideal process each day, they appreciate the flexibility inherent to the Agiloft system.  

Initially, the ETS team experienced some detractors, but after working with those users directly and including them in future UAT processes, a solution was put in place that wowed the entire team.  

“We’ve had companies, vendors that we’ve worked with for years. We’ve had MSAs, upon SOWs, upon amendments for one of our vendors in the hundreds. Now with Agiloft, you can go to that company and click a button to see everything open or expired for that account. For them, you can’t put a price tag on that.” Laurie said.  

The future  

There is much on the docket for the future relationship between ETS and Agiloft. As mentioned, the ETS team knew in 2020 that they would eventually expand, and the company has indeed acquired several global subsidiaries over the last few years. ETS is also in the process of building its third instance of Agiloft, created specifically for change management with their largest contracted partner.  

While ETS has seen significant process improvements, the contracting team is hard at work continuing to brainstorm the ways they can win with Agiloft’s technology.  

Laurie, an ETS veteran but a freshman contract manager at the beginning of this story, led and then built a team around her that solidified Agiloft as a fundamental piece of ETS’ business processes. Since that initial implementation in 2020, Laurie has advanced from being the contract’s team project representative to the Operations Strategic Planning Director for the entire organization. Today, Laurie manages a team of people and ensures that all company-wide software is as impactful for the business as the project she led with Agiloft.  

Listen to the full ETS story and interview with Laurie Longo to see how you can create real change at your organization with CLM!