Case Study
FTI Technology Provides Contract Lifecycle Management Transformation, Supports Merger Readiness for Leading Food Retailer
On the heels of an extensive information governance, privacy and records management overhaul supported by FTI Technology, a large North American retail chain was pursuing a contract lifecycle management (CLM) implementation. The company aimed to centralize its contracts, deploy a new CLM tool, establish new contracting policies and improve workflows ahead of a planned merger. FTI Technology’s Corporate Legal Operations experts were engaged to ensure the project remained on course and provide a full transformation of contracting processes.
Situation
As part of the company’s work to evaluate and redesign information governance and records management, contracts were identified as a record category that required new policies, procedures and a dedicated tool to manage going forward. The company’s head of legal innovation was looking to improve the CLM project’s progress and enable clear visibility into the company’s end-to-end contract lifecycle. FTI Technology was asked to step in, ensure a successful deployment of the selected tool, and ensure the new program accounted for the company’s organizational and operational nuances.
Although the CLM software selection process was complete and the commercial team had invested time in the clause library when FTI Technology was engaged, gaps and inconsistencies in the contracting foundation remained, including the absence of a detailed contracting policy, end-to-end contracting workflows and real-time reporting ability. The project also lacked a change management plan to ensure that users across the business were prepared to adopt the new tool, comply with policies and use the new contract templates the legal team had created.
This work was needed against the backdrop of a dispersed company spanning more than a dozen individual brands, 50 states, lengthy real estate agreements and a highly complex contracting environment. Moreover, certain aspects of the project faced additional rigor and urgency as the client prepared for an impending merger.
Our Role
FTI Technology’s Corporate Legal Operations experts began at the process documentation and legacy contract migration planning phase of the project.
To date, the team has provided the following in this ongoing engagement:
- Process documentation, including defining workflows and required escalations for who must review specific terms and conditions (across sourcing, privacy, security, finance, etc.) before contracts are considered final. FTI Technology interviewed key stakeholders within the company, including commercial attorneys, legal operations, strategic sourcing, finance and IT to understand the full end-to-end process for each unique type of contracts.
- Developed a comprehensive contracting policy outlining permissions for signature according to different types of contract provisions and value, guidelines for subcommittee review for high value contracts, storage rules for contracts, and requirements for metadata tags.
- Supplemented the client’s clause library with governance parameters for how to manage the clause library, who has authority to change clauses and how frequently clauses must be revisited.
- Defined roles and responsibilities for the various stakeholders in the end-to-end contracting workflow to be enabled by the selected CLM system.
- Established key repository policies, including naming conventions and metadata tags for contracts so they can be easily organized and managed within the CLM tool.
- Migration strategy and execution to move tens of thousands of supplier agreements and hundreds of thousands of real estate and construction agreements from disparate sources into a single system. Through meetings with numerous repository owners, the team developed a phased and prioritized migration plan for the contract categories
- Initial implementation planning and ongoing support for implementation change management, including training plans and materials to support and engage employees as they adopt the new CLM policy, workflows and software.
Our Impact
- FTI Technology’s holistic approach and focus on mapping CLM implementation directly to business needs and value, enabled the client to revive and execute an important strategic initiative, even during a time of significant organization-wide change. The client is now positioned to successfully stand up workflows and systems that they previously thought could not be effectively used.
- Through a combination of contract management expertise, technical proficiency and thorough planning, the team delivered a rigorous migration strategy, including a prioritized plan to structure key contract data points to better understand their contract portfolio
- Change management plans ensured the new program was socialized and attentive to everyone who would be impacted by the new workflows, policies and technology.
- A three-phased implementation plan was created to help the client achieve early successes with the new CLM workflow and build momentum to later implement especially challenging and complicated contracting processes.