California affordable housing leader drives operational efficiencies with Agiloft CLM

Still managing your contracts in Word and Excel?

You’re not alone. Until recently, Century Housing Corporation, a California-based non-profit leader in affordable housing, managed all of their contracting with these tools.  

But as their organization grew, Century realized they needed a proper Contract Lifecycle Management system. After discovering and implementing Agiloft, Century was able to streamline complex business procedures, allowing their staff to make more informed, strategic decisions. 

Read on below to learn more about Century’s search for a contracting solution and how Agiloft exceeded their needs with the power of flexible CLM.

About Century Housing Corporation

For more than 25 years, Century Housing Corporation—a private nonprofit community development financial leader— has been dedicated to constructing affordable homes in California. Century has generated more than $2 billion in financing for the development of 45,000+ new affordable homes. Additionally, they manage more than $600 million in capital and create thousands of construction jobs each year.  

The challenges at hand

Over the last 25 years, Century experimented with various contract management systems. Yet no solution was a perfect match, and the organization ultimately found themselves using tools such as Microsoft Word, Excel, and email to manage their contracting. 

But as Century’s success and business operations grew, so did the limitations of those applications. The lack of a centralized repository to store contracts and send notifications resulted in disorderly workflows, inefficient version controls, and a tangled thread of back-and-forth emails for their loan committee work. 

Disorganization and inefficiency began to get in the way of the organization’s success. Century leaders knew they needed to prioritize a collaborative culture throughout the organization while still maintaining a flexible approach to procedure. A solution was critical.  

Putting a solution to the test

After shopping around the vendor marketplace, Century Housing was introduced to Agiloft through JHensley Consulting, a California-based Agiloft partner and CLM consulting firm. With the help of JHensley, Century was provided with a custom, proof-of-concept demo featuring some of their toughest business process requirements.  

Century liked that, with Agiloft, they could be an integral voice in the creation of their own customized solution. They needed a system adjusted to meet their precise needs. Luckily, Agiloft CLM is fundamentally flexible, an aspect Century found lacking in other solutions.

“Ultimately, Agiloft allowed us to create a program that mirrored our desired workflow and allowed for the customization we needed,” said Josh Hamilton, Senior Vice President of Century Housing.   

Transforming and streamlining business processes

After implementing Agiloft CLM, Century was able to fully automate their complex lending process.  

Starting with the initial application and ending with a fully funded loan, the custom solution includes a web portal for borrowers to submit project and loan applications, automates internal due diligence, task management, and document management, and provides customized underwriting reports, credit memos, and alerts—all designed to provide insight into every angle of the lender’s portfolio and process. 

Out of all the challenges that Century was facing, one of the most important was the organization’s ability to comprehensively analyze a borrower’s risk profile to make informed decisions.  

Embracing Agiloft as their CLM solution allowed Century to streamline this process. Loan officers can now focus on other key responsibilities such as data entry, third-party reports, gathering documents from the borrower, and more.  

Today, when a loan officer logs on to Century’s system, they immediately see the due diligence items organized in a central location, allowing them to efficiently evaluate the risk profile. 

Now, multiple people can work on the same loan at once, adding value to Century as a whole. The loan officer, underwriter, loan admins, and executives can all go into Agiloft to add information to a loan package. They’re saving time and resources through their restructured automated workflow. 

“Having a cloud-based platform where everyone on the team can input information on the loan without worrying about overwriting someone else’s work is a game changer,” Hamilton said. 

Embracing Agiloft’s multi-faceted benefits

As Century’s knowledge of Agiloft CLM increased, they discovered a wealth of benefits far beyond the contracts themselves.  

One of these features is transparent task management. This contract management tool lets team members keep track of completed tasks as well as responsibilities that still need to be handled. Century’s formerly cumbersome workflow transformed into an organizational masterpiece, featuring a tool that leads team members to a completed contract, step by step. And that’s just one of the many new advantages Century enjoys.

“Agiloft’s ability to generate our documents means that each stakeholder can input their piece of the puzzle, and then — with a push of a button — our credit memo and loan documents can be generated without all of the back and forth we had previously,” Hamilton said. 

Prior to partnering with Agiloft, Century was already a successful organization. But by leveraging Agiloft to achieve its goals, it has been able to reach a new level of success and efficiency, delivering the best possible service to its customers.  

How can Agiloft help your organization?

Agiloft’s agile contract lifecycle management software allows organizations to take back control with automated workflows and reduced risk, all the while driving revenue and removing the manual burden of building better contracts faster.  

The average enterprise maintains 20,000 to 40,000 contracts, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers, yet despite the numerous benefits of CLM, most companies still manage contractual obligations and contracting processes manually. An estimated 85% of companies do not have an enterprise contract management system, a fact gained from Gartner’s research. This is a risky decision in today’s business ecosystem. 

The benefits of a smart, customized CLM solution allow for insight into your contracts and seamlessly guide your team through the steps to get there. This type of transparency translates into and transforms your complete corporate culture. Most importantly, CLM equips businesses for smooth scalable growth in an advancing technological business climate. 

An enterprise-level CLM system like Agiloft is an investment in the future of your organization. Ensuring that vendor contracts are efficient, compliant, secure, perform to optimized standards, and are managed in a streamlined and centralized system that significantly reduces costs, brings a quick ROI, and boosts the bottom line. 

Schedule a free custom demo and explore how a CLM system can benefit your organization.