The brief
Lander & Rogers was engaged by an Australian operator specialising in premium retirement living communities to overhaul and automate their contract management processes. The objective was to streamline the creation, approval, and management of their procurement contract templates, significantly reducing the manual workload while enhancing overall efficiency.
The challenge
The organisation faced challenges managing a high volume of different contract types. Relying on manual processes led to inefficiencies, inaccuracies, and delays. The manual approach taken made it difficult to ensure consistency and could result in time-consuming errors. The core objective of this project was to automate these processes using a sophisticated document automation system, ensuring greater accuracy, consistent formatting, and faster turnaround times, ultimately reducing the strain on internal resources.
The solution
Lander & Rogers designed a tailored solution that focused on automating and customising the client’s contract production and approval workflows. The first step was to understand the organisation's processes, templates and commercial and risk triggers.
Next, the Lander & Rogers team worked closely with the client to code their templates, adapting the standard to suit their specific operational requirements. This included building dynamic, automated clauses into the templates and ensuring seamless integration with existing software platforms already in use by the client. A clause banking system was implemented, which allowed for efficient retrieval and use of pre-approved language, additionally and electronic signature integration was configured to streamline the contract signing process.
To ensure quality, rigorous testing was conducted, allowing feedback from pilot users to be incorporated into the final product. Adjustments were made to the coding and workflows based on real-world testing, ensuring the system would be robust and fit for purpose.
Finally, enhanced approval workflows were integrated into the system, aligning with SharePoint to manage specific village details, while facilitating approval processes for legal, tax, and LOA authorisations. This ensured a smoother, more efficient approval process across all levels of the organisation. The automated templates 'baked in' the organisation's preferred positions for their contracts, while including the flexibility and governance of fallback positions linked to approval workflows.
The value
The automation initiative delivered a highly efficient contract management system, enabling the client to drastically reduce manual efforts, reduce back-and-forth between commercial and legal teams, minimise errors, and accelerate contract creation and approval processes. The advanced workflows and integration with existing platforms meant that their internal teams could focus on higher-value tasks, leaving the tedious work of contract management to the streamlined and reliable automated system. The result was not only improved operational efficiency but also increased confidence in the accuracy and consistency of their legal documentation.
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