Pharmaceutical company paves the way for innovative changes

Challenge
The pharmaceutical company is a lean organization prioritizing efficiency and compliance with a heavy focus on process optimization and enforcements through IT solutions. As a result, their IT landscape is very advanced in terms of integrated systems. Tenders and contracts are a challenging area for them. Before Conga, there were four disparate IT solutions to carry out key contract operations including review, approval, storage, and price change. Some of their contract documents were stored in a shared drive repository and some physically in a secured contract room. Visibility into the contract lifecycle was limited when it came to renewals or the expiration of their contracts. As a result, significant manual work was required daily. 

In addition, their contract solution at that time didn’t fit their business needs as they planned to leverage their Salesforce CRM platform for a consistent user experience. Their existing contract solution lacked integration with the company’s customer relationship management system—requiring employees to manually enter customer information for each new contract. Aside from an inefficient use of employees’ time the solution also required them to manually re-enter data from one platform to another, creating a breeding ground for human error.

It was during their annual contract renewals process that the company started to experience significant performance issues with their software. Approximately 80% of contract extensions and renewals involved tendering for business. For most renewals—around which there was no formal process—a new tender document had to be prepared from scratch. This was a paper-intensive process that had employees reinventing the wheel every time.

Solution
When the pharmaceutical company started their Conga CLM implementation journey, it was never about just the IT solution. As a customer-centric organization, it was top of mind for them to identify how they could implement industry best practices to not only help their business but to also maximize their customers’ experience. While planning to eventually bring AI into their contract process, they decided to start small in the first release, allowing them to have a metadata-enabled single repository of all contracts with simple workflow approvals.

Migrating their sales contracts from the corporate contract management system to Conga CLM enabled them to implement a variety of features to enhance multiple stages of their contract lifecycles. When creating contracts, internal users can now work within a single interface, moving seamlessly between client information and contract documentation to eliminate inaccuracies and save time.  

The e-signing capabilities of the DocuSign Adapter allowed them to improve the client experience by automating the previously paper-based transaction and enabling multiple users to collaborate on the same document simultaneously. For annual contract reviews, Conga CLM utilizes metadata around key contract information to initiate the review process 60 days before the contract is due for renewal.    

This also enabled the company to manage risk more efficiently by maintaining contract templates that support the client-level tagging of contract clauses. Not only does this minimize rework when a new tender needs to be created, but it also provides the ability to produce pragmatic clause-level reports. For example, when many companies were struggling financially during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, they were able to manage their risk exposure by grouping and analyzing clauses to identify potential non-payment situations. 

Beyond the solution itself, the Conga implementation process gave the company the opportunity to review their end-to-end business processes and initiate fundamental changes that had a positive impact on the entire enterprise. These included gradually eliminating case-specific customer demands and adopting a more systematic and efficient approach to client service. Over the next several years, through several new releases, the company implemented the consumer price index (CPI) review process, contract price changes (amendments), and service contract renewals. In addition, they integrated Conga CLM with their enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution through API. 
 

Business outcomes
With their new Conga CLM solution, the company experiences the benefits in their system-enforced compliance. It enabled a robust contract review, approval, and end-to-end contract lifecycle process, so that they know exactly when a contract is expiring, when the CPI review needs to be done, and when it needs to be extended. This has also created closer collaborations among sales, legal, and finance teams. 

With Conga CLM, they were also able to begin a dialogue with their customers to streamline end-to-end CLM processes for their benefits. Conga’s ability to handle customer-provided contract templates is a game changer.

One of the most important benefits is the consistent user experience. Salesforce is the company’s CRM platform and allows their sales team to manage the opportunities and contract agreements on the same platform meaning they don’t need to learn, remember how to use, and navigate among various systems—it all comes intuitively.

• Increased efficiency and productivity through automating the contract creation and renewal processes
• Reduced manual reworks, time savings, and eliminating errors
• Improved risk management through clause-level reporting
• Fundamental improvements to business operations across the entire enterprise