Solving supply chain challenges with flexible CLM

Is your approach to supply chain management exposing your company to real risk?

With today’s ever-changing supply chain and market challenges, gone are the days of manually managing suppliers and their associated service agreements. Now, more than ever, it’s essential to cut costs and adapt outdated and inefficient processes.

Fortunately, the right solution can also help your company reduce risk in the process. But how?

In a recent webinar with the Sourcing Industry Group (SIG), Danielle Haugland, Global Alliance Director at Agiloft, and the Senior Technical Project Manager at a leading healthcare company selected Agiloft’s flexible no-code CLM platform to solve their supply chain issues and increase efficiencies and ROI across the enterprise.

The need for CLM

This Agiloft customer is a leading healthcare company that provides quality inpatient, outpatient and post-acute services close to home. The company owns and operates community hospitals, regional health systems, physician practices, outpatient centers, and post-acute facilities in 29 states.

Prior to implementing Agiloft CLM, the customer, which is made up of multiple subsidiaries, relied on numerous legacy systems and Excel spreadsheets – and in some cases, even physical file cabinets – to manage their contracts.

“When you look at not having any system, obviously you’re going to have a lot of Excel sheets, you’re going to have disparate locations of contracts, whether it be in a file cabinet, in somebody’s house, whatever you have,” the Senior Project Manager said.

This discombobulation lead to a lack of visibility into their contracts and confusion about contract terminology, prompting them to seek a centralized contract repository where they could search for and locate documents.

“You need…a solution that is going to provide you at least a foundation that says, ‘hey, a contract’s a contract, a customer’s a customer, those are the baseline,” he said.

Getting to that baseline is the first level of the maturity model.

“Seeing the organization going from not having that to having that baseline, it’s very powerful.”

The journey to choosing a solution

Like all successful projects, this healthcare company’s two-year journey in selecting and fully implementing Agiloft CLM began with lots of planning and specifying key requirements for their CLM system.

The company began with a broad sourcing approach, assessing 60 different solutions to research and evaluate.

One of their top requirements? ROI.

“[ROI] was the catalyst for really looking at a CLM,” the project manager said. “The most important thing is that you really have to assess what your organization’s needs are, and that’s organizationally people and then process. And then obviously the tech can come.”

In addition to ROI, another key requirement of a CLM system was its ability to integrate with other systems.

“The plan was to integrate our CLM with other core functions, whether it be our ERP, our CRM, and I’m putting a lot of acronyms out there, but there are a lot of different systems that, in the ecosystem, you’ve got to plan for,” he said.

Eventually with the help of industry analysts like Forrester and Gartner, those 60 solutions were distilled down to about a dozen solutions, which were then reduced to a handful of top contenders that underwent a highly-detailed RFP process. From there, the healthcare company provided the vendors with a use case to help represent their environment.

Another top concern for the customer? Data visibility and management.

“Data’s super important for us, and at the end of the day, when we look at reporting, we’ve got to look downstream at the output side.”

Stakeholders from every group in IT were involved in the procurement process, and they carefully assessed each solution for things like functionality and key integrations. “There’s a lot of factors at play.”

Implementing Agiloft CLM

The healthcare company implemented Agiloft in 8 different phases across the company, starting with the supply chain division, the department that developed the ROI for the solution.

The first step was to get the product up and running so that the company didn’t have to rely on manual processes and Excel spreadsheets any longer. The next step was to build key IT infrastructure integrations such as a master data repository for all of their facility locations.

“One of the benefits of doing that is, obviously everybody understands what everybody else is doing. We were very siloed,” the project manager said.

Once those siloes were removed, they discovered that there were discrepancies in how the team was referring to contracts and their classifications.

“One of the things that we did as part of our phase one is to agree on at least some level of a common taxonomy, that when we went into our enterprise system and you search a contract, you would search it by whatever classification,” he said.

Coalescing disparate legal teams who all used different systems allowed for a greater synergy and standardizations in business procedures moving forward.

“I think there’s players and there’s partners in the market, and Agiloft is one of those that we have the flexibility to manage our own table structure, and that is a super powerful capability when your other sources of data may not even measure up,” he said.

Solving business challenges with CLM

Like many other industries, healthcare was greatly impacted by the global ramifications of COVID-19, especially when it came to labor costs and supply chain management.

To combat these challenges, the organization relied on their contract data, looking at inflation rates, upcoming renewals, and price points.

“I think having that capability to have visibility into your portfolio, it allows you to make better decisions,” the project manager said.