Charles River Laboratories creates a faster medical research pipeline with Conga CLM and Conga CPQ 

Charles River Laboratories began as a one-person laboratory in 1947. Since then it has grown to a global company that provides products and services across the drug discovery and development continuum. A leading contributor to the advancement of novel therapeutics and medical treatments, Charles River Laboratories offers scientific expertise and assistance to pharmaceutical and biotech companies to ensure safe and effective drugs are brought to market.

Initially, Charles River Laboratories implemented Conga CPQ in its Microbial business which has a wide range of SKU-based products. The Conga CPQ functionality allowed the company to expedite the generation of annual pricing agreements for these products and send them to clients. Automating these agreements with CPQ reduced the cycle time in setting pricing. In the next phase, Conga CLM was implemented across all of Charles River Laboratories’ lines of business. The sales team uses Salesforce, and Conga CLM being built on Salesforce meant all team members could access it and easily use it without a major learning curve.  

Conga CLM has enabled each salesperson to perform the contracting process almost independently, reducing the time investment required from other departments. For instance, if a salesperson needs a confidentiality agreement, they can generate it with a pre-built, legal-approved template in Conga CLM and send it to the customer without needing support from the legal department.  

Another use case Conga CLM will help automate is creating a services agreement that requires a statement of work exhibit. Salespeople used to have to email back and forth with other departments to get the information they needed. Conga CLM will let them specify the products and services required for the agreement and automatically create the statement of work exhibit. The data will be automatically passed to the finance and operational teams, saving time and effort. 

Charles River Laboratories has a number of customer-facing agreements that vary in complexity that the sales team routinely needs to generate and distribute. Savarino and his team plan to standardize and automate approximately a dozen different agreement types across the business and have already accomplished half of this overall goal with Conga CLM.  

After going live with Conga CLM, Charles River Laboratories discovered an unexpected challenge. The company had a four-level customer hierarchy in its Salesforce system, which presented an obstacle in connecting agreements to the correct affiliates within the hierarchy. Using Conga CLM, the company was able to build a feature that it named the Wizard for Affiliate Mapping, or WAM. WAM automatically narrows the list which allows both sales and legal to easily identify and select the accounts that are in scope for an agreement, providing an efficient, creative solution and a more accurate picture of agreements.

Setting up notifications in Conga CLM ensured that salespeople were aware of completed actions throughout the contract process and that they had the information they needed when they needed it. Notifications also helped the sales team know when actions haven't been completed so that they can follow up.  

Conga CLM improved the legal team’s negotiations, tracking of clauses and key data points, and ability to view up-to-date reports, assignments, and progress. Negotiators had the information they needed across the lifecycle from request through completion. Leveraging Conga’s patented Microsoft Word plug-in also helped the team easily build templates, generate documents, and track redlines, using a familiar tool with robust functionality.   

The sales team also reported that after implementing Conga CLM, they enjoyed doing more of their job in Salesforce. Implementing Conga CLM allowed them to better adopt Salesforce and take advantage of everything that the system has to offer, helping to move the organization toward a single source of truth for contracts.