Sign North Dakota Profit Sharing Agreement Template Fast

Document type sign profit sharing agreement template north dakota fast

good morning good afternoon and good evening and welcome to our webinar today the colleagues are still joining so you haven't missed anything uh we'll just hang on a few seconds to allow all of all of our participants to join and then we will be making uh making a start it looks like that's leveling off now so again good morning good afternoon and good evening and welcome to our webinar today how to build globally scalable contract management processes it's uh it's my pleasure to to welcome our partner for today the agile company um to to participate in this really exciting webinar we have three panelists today for our discussion we have donovan bell from uh docent bobcat north america we and we have miles van luven from agiloft and myself paul branch i'm the chief technology officer here at world commerce and contracting so before we start let's do our normal housekeeping as you'll see from the slide we've got a presentation that's going to last about 45 minutes please ask questions as we go using the q a tab uh we'll we'll address those questions hopefully with the panel um at the relevant moment if not we'll have a q a slot at the end for us to pick up some more of those meaty questions and absolutely we are recording today so you've joined us in with your lines muted um but you will get a copy of both the presentation that we're about to run through with you and also a link to the the recording so that you can you know if you missed a bit you can go back and listen again or most importantly for those colleagues who are joining us on the replay welcome to that and we hope that you enjoy the show so um we've got a lot to cover so let's kick off i'll introduce the um the panelists a bit more detail in just a second but before we get into that uh in typical world commerce and contracting style let's do a poll let's reach out to you our audience we're really interested to hear what is your greatest obstacle to commercial transformation is it the that you don't know where the contracts are located you're struggling to find your contractual form is it in obtaining stakeholder approval of the solution that you'd like to put in place is it the total cost of ownership of that solution is it finding a solution that meets the business need or is it something else so please do uh do um make your your views known by selecting one of those options on the screen there and when the poll closes we'll we'll take a quick look um it's we chatted about this before before we started and um certainly pre pandemic that first item would have been a biggie but i'm not so sure now i think i think there's we're going to see a bit more of a spread but i'm always wrong on these panels so so let's take a look let's take a look so if we could close the pole now emma that will be fantastic and let's just have a quick quick look at the results if you could pop the poll results up that would be great ah there we go so yes um i was i was certainly right on the fact that we'd see a bit more of a spread selecting a solution that meets the business need 36 percent and then and then the um gaining stakeholder approval no big surprise that's one of our key pitfalls that we see routinely in the deployment of clm systems and and donovan particularly is going to talk about that in his session so hang on for that cost is obviously another important point and so too remains finding finding contracts but it's great it's great to see that that is that that is finally sliding down the scale of importance so we're going to cover quite a few of these issues as we as we go through our presentation today but what i'd like to do first is i'd like to bring in miles so miles is our colleague from from agiloft and miles uh quite a bit has been happening at adelock recently you've got some new leadership and you've certainly raised a bit of money so can you tell us what's been going on yeah absolutely thanks paul it's great to be on this webinar it has been quite a year for agileft in in last august we announced a 45 million dollar growth equity investment from ftb capital and with that we've brought on some fantastic leaders and and a lot of talent some of the leaders are eric laflin our new ceo who joined uh in the in the middle of last year and then we also brought on brought in a new chief revenue officer um kevin niblock who came from zora and then we brought on a new chief product officer andy wisher who has a an immense background in in this space and we're really excited to have all on board also we've been recognizing the industry as a leader in in multiple fronts so gartner recognizes as a leader in its first magic quadrant for clm and then a few weeks later in gartner's critical capabilities report we were the top rated clm vendor in all four kit use cases procurement sales legal and enterprise and then our engineering team um won some awards a big innovation award and a stevie for our ai corps and then of course you know none of this would be possible without great customers like donovan so really excited to hear his story and and what his experience has been that's a great segue it's almost as though we practiced it so um let's bring in donovan donovan bell from do store doosan bobcat north america now so donovan is uh the north american regional site lead where donovan you spearheaded your company's efforts to transform contract processes on a global scale really interesting stuff and something that our members are really keen to understand from you how you went about doing it so why do you why don't you tell us start by by starting a little bit about the organization that you work for sure thanks paul and definitely happy to be here and appreciating this time with you and miles and you know the rest of the folks painted watching this do some bobcat north america just to give you a heads up is part of the doosan group and it employs more than about forty three thousand i know there says 41 but it's increased since then across 38 countries worldwide based in seoul korea but our headquarters is in west fargo north dakota so we offer customer products and solutions to help build stronger businesses and communities and support brands which include bobcat compatib compact equipment doosan portable power products bobcat mowers ryan and steiner grounds care equipment and heath attachments so being dispersed so broadly it yields a distinct but common challenge across enterprise organizations in which we have a need to support you know regional processes and objectives while also also centering around our global strategy and aligning worldwide initiatives so it's not foreign you know to our contract life's that our contract life cycle management needs also has some complex globally diverse needs as well and it requires you know relationships across technology operations and our business units in order to be successful and so that's what you know started off our perspective of our contract life cycle management journey yeah it's certainly a recognizable brand here in here in the us uh bobcat you see it forever around uh the ever ongoing maintenance of our roadways um but i'm sure our audience donovan would really like to hear about also the contract professionals that are in your organization and what they're currently doing so that they can maybe relate to their own experiences i mean do you work mainly on the buy side on the sell side are you using your own paper or third party paper and before you deployed the clm tools were you completely manual or did you have some automation in there to start with or give us a sense for how for where you where you started from yeah no that's a great question um our first implementation began about four or five years ago when we went down this path and in in doing so we were very immature from a process standpoint a lot of our contracts were manually stored on either physical paper someone's uh laptop or computer depending on the unit in question and so it definitely started off where we just had a need for first just having a central repository of sorts and that was something that and when i say we those stakeholders being our general counsel and our uh sourcing procurement leadership and the professionals within that channel as well as our technology components and so when you ask that question about paper a lot of it was basically third-party paper and and trying to at least just get to a place where we had consistency and storage uh and understanding how we would work approval flows that was held in an individual basis distinctly across regions differently and something that we had to really rally around to get some synergy there and so roughly how many how many folks in that commercial space with commercial and contract resources did you have yeah from a from a commercial contracts perspective uh our legal council teams across regions typically are roughly about four to five and in some cases seven seven or so professionals that are responsible for that aspect now our sourcing and procurement area when you we look at it from multiple functions we do a lot of our direct deals and as well as indirect so from services but also supporting our supply chain so how we get to the point of manufacturing our product and the partners that we rely on in order to do that as well as we have a dealer channel and that's where we actually do a lot of our sales and manufacturing and so those are the different components and variations there of our contracts when we talk about from an indirect perspective there are different business units as we'll kind of dive into a little bit further sure sure so so let's do that let's look at some of your specific drivers the business initiative the obstacles and your your critical capabilities that you identified yeah and it's great question in in a lot of ways our challenges were started off kind of from a remedial perspective how do we just know what contracts we have and how are we consistent in storing them so that we can kind of de-risk ourselves from that aspect second we didn't have really a consistent signing execution and approval flow um and interactions were basically one-off phone calls emails and we didn't have that captured so we couldn't learn from uh mistakes or successes of the past and so we we really needed to have a uh a solution that gave us that ability to look holistically at our landscape be able to leverage globally at some point how we are negotiating and working through our contracts and really kind of having a cohesive approach to how we manage our contracts and sourcing negotiation approaches so questions coming from from bob uh bob's asked how important is it to have metrics in place i either i assume just before or indeed to measure how well you're doing in the decline i i think it's critical um and and i can speak from experience of not having those metrics uh pushes you down more of a emotional path of a from a decision making perspective that data makes it very clear and present to really help and drive key process changes that are necessary for you to be efficient and effective so i would say it's been vital um we we still are a work in progress in terms of the evolution of the kpis that we are putting into place to really be the driver so that again we're making data decisions as opposed to emotionally based decisions very good now so jack is asked how long did it take you to implement your process with that a lot the actual so now we're kind of diving into that uh you know roll out aspect and timing from a roll out perspective of the tool itself really was maybe about a three month period it wasn't a long cycle to actually implement the solution itself but as i think we'll continue to talk about change management is everything in in regards to adoption of the tool set alignment to processes we still even yet today from a company perspective we were very regionally focused when we went down the path of implementing this solution but we since have structured ourselves in a more global capacity which now requires change management because the way things were done in our european area is completely different than what we would do in north america and so now there's an alignment that has to happen in order to be effective so so let's talk a little bit about that clearly the the the the features that are on the screen right now are critical for a holistic clm solution i think most folks would agree with that and so what was your plan for implementing such a wide reaching capability and perhaps if you could hone in on that question that we saw at the beginning about the importance of stakeholder engagement absolutely your experiences there that would be good sure and if you wouldn't mind moving to the next i believe next slide um and and these are the questions that we kind of talk through in terms of who are our stakeholders so when we think about our stakeholders from that aspect again it started off very much our general legal council our our technology what we call it do some bobcat our process innovation in i.t or information technology division leadership at that at that scale and then our sourcing procurement across our supply chain that component so it's kind of a three-pronged decision-making governance body that helped us decide what our rollout strategy was going to be pertaining to contract life cycle management um it was really more lead legal than anything else because the the primary focus was about de-risking ourselves and having a singular uh repository but we've evolved and realized there is a whole lot more that we could unlock from a process perspective from an efficiency perspective to really think more broadly around our contract life cycle management approach and our again our approval flows have any signature built in those type of things and so we did have an extensive uh rfp selection process to determine uh who that player was and we were able to you know showcase different uh different providers that had solutions and we and we looked at different factors such as you know cost drivers and uh flexibility in the tool set that agility was necessary because again we're constantly evolving and changing and if you can move to the next slide it kind of highlights um the kind of the pronged approach if you will starting off in our european area that was when we first launched the contract lifecycle management tool started off in our european areas and and then then shifted into our north america location and then ultimately finally you see here it's a south america latin america area but also that includes our asia-pacific regions as well so so nathaniel's are asked a very probing question um i think from your description it's clear that this was a sole solution as part of a larger strategy what was the primary driver of the strategy that led you down this path of deploying a solution across your corporation it looks really good but uh hidden behind all of that is some of these things we kind of jumped into i will say as opposed to strategically mapped out um when we started our adoption so i'm saying you know this this phased approach as though there was a intentionally planned phase approach uh ironically it wasn't that way we started off uh in that specific region and um we then you know having uh collaborative discussions um seeing where best practices were each kind of region did their own thing uh and so the uh while you see that breakout of phases the reality is in timing five years back i believe is when we first rolled out into our european area armenia region and it wasn't until i believe uh two years later that we then rolled out into our north america area and we just recently rolled out uh into our uh asia latin america region just last year so this is something that we've had a consistent um shift of change management adoption and collaboration to get us to how we align that so i'd like to say it was a you know an upfront strategy of how we would globally align it didn't start that way we really were looking at this purely from a regional perspective and since evolved and said there's more synergies inefficiencies we could obtain by aligning the obvious response to the question great question nathaniel thank you um so certainly uh at world commerce and contracting and my per onal view too is that big bangs never work they always end up in fireworks right bad idea so so a a a baby step approach be that by region as you as you did or it might be across the globe but with a certain contracting type or a certain set of individuals segmenting the role out in into chunks that are easily consumable is a really really smart thing of a deployment strategy so miles did does that does that resonate with you is that what you've seen with other with other companies in this space yes absolutely um and i think that like you said a big bang can result in uh in a big bank which is not what you want right i think you want to take a bite-size approach to it um focus on a very concrete um part of the business solve a problem there um you know and then advance the initiative forward from there so um you know it is sort of a tactical um solve a problem and then move on to the next one approach sure now that that does require an underlying platform that is agile agility in that deployment model is absolutely mission critical because donovan i i i i expect that things that you learned in in deploying into region one you you you rolled into your deployment in region two so you didn't start from uh from that same position of of uh finding your feet so successive deployments were more efficient than the previous one is that was that your experience or not 100 yeah and i think that's the thing that was kind of serendipitous if you will about the approach that we took it really did enable us to be nimble and make corrective action decisions if you will on an iterative basis and it also led to uh when we looked at those regional rollouts we were able to learn from mistakes of the past and not apply those and so we were able to be very efficient and and and prompt in terms of our ability to roll out so when i talked about that initial rollout of maybe a three to four month period uh shifting into the different regions it got it did accelerate even further because we did have a singular instance that could be propagated across the regions but in collaborating with the stakeholders and understanding their process needs that turnaround time was even more effective it wasn't like we had a continued system huge technology project rollout we were able to do that in a lot of cases with resources of maybe one or two from uh from our process in an i.t side uh collaborating with our agileft consultant if you will to do that roll out which was very effective so so the talking about deployment has obviously hit a nerve with our with our with the folks listening in because the balls just lit up with a whole range of questions so so i think we've got some time to adjust just a few of them so um diego's asked going back to that question about metrics and measures um did did was there a set of recommended kpis that you were running with maybe that agile often helped you with to identify or did you have some uh that were sort of homegrown and if so what was the largest obstacle in figuring out which kpis to use and measure would you say we're still working through that because definition of success sometimes can be an elusive uh decision uh or or conclusion if you will and and if we could go to that next slide to really talk about what are those outcomes that we were looking for um where we kind of landed is are we getting better at the end of the day um in terms of that question about the kpis themselves agileft did offer you know kind of a sample set of kpis that have been leveraged as well as strong you know kind of business case uh tools to help help extrapolate that but i'll be honest we kind of looked at that ourselves we was from our perspective some of that was naive some of it was just we had some specific go gets that we were looking for as a company and so when i when we look at this slide here and think about those components that were really key it was all about the outcomes you know are we getting faster contract turnaround are we getting increased fte efficiency and so when we talk about that efficiency piece the one thing i just want to highlight that we did do being in a spot where we were very immature we didn't have even the bandwidth to shift to using our own paper uh in building you know cohesive templates and things that we can govern by us going down this path of a solution that was in place and automating some features we were able to then get our our professionals general counsel legal focused on what they typically will do and and do their do their jobs more effectively such as helping us build some templates things like that that we're not constantly looking at our own or a third-party paper for all of our contracts and we could be consistent with some of our supply agreements things like that and what we wanted and so that was an example of something yeah that's that's a that's a great segue john asks did your operation originally have to build an active clause library from scratch or did your legal department have some of that information already stored as a as a starting point so um that's a good question that i can't really answer and the reason why is i need to put this disclaimer out there i am not our legal general counsel uh and and and not as well versed so i i'd be giving more um of what my you know what i my assumption is around that i think there definitely were some uh tools and practices that they leveraged and applied but i i don't know specifically um certainly if you're if you're using templates that would that would seem to suggest that you brought with you some some uh historical performance historical right i have to believe yes on that just because of the way that we've implemented some things and some of the general templates that we're driving down a path and from my prior background i've been able to kind of i'm aware of it but i'm not i'm not versed enough in in our team's practices to know that part no no worries okay let's keep on working our way around the uh around the circle sure sure so again faster contract turnaround with us building in our approval flow process um what usually typically you know took um potentially weeks to get approvals uh or in some cases even longer was was streamlined to a matter of days in some cases hours for us to be able to do that so that was a huge aspect there full control over our contract creation so we actually were able to now consistently have a process and approach for on a business unit basis for within our sourcing and procurement professionals uh buying and purchasing and also from a technology perspective we were able to really drive some consistency uh in in uh the commercials that we were going about uh the type of categories that we built out of that so again and as i kind of alluded to the approval process that control of contract review negotiation and execution um it did streamline those aspects again timing and efficiency was key it did lead us to a more structured low risk approach one we had a repository for things we knew we're one one source of the truth and it captured a lot of the back and forth dialogue as well with our supply base and our internal team from an approval perspective so you had a reference point that you could go back to when you talk about learning from history as well paul we were able to do that and so it was it was there was there are a lot of really key wins and opens which ultimately led to our improved contract management processing across the board and so having partners you know such as miles with agiloft it ended up really being successful for us to be able to be nimble agile and more efficient and effective brilliant brilliant so so again more questions coming in um questions from jit um around that one location for storage of all contracts are all your contracts housed in agiloft or did you have these contracts integrated through another system um a document management system or something else or are they stored all in the tool itself um the the end game is to have them all stored in the tool there are some integration points that we absolutely have to kind of build and play you know we use another solution if you will for our dealer contracts and so there's kind of a synergy there that we have to align to our our supply and manufacturing base versus our dealer channel and sales aspect and so we we we are doing some type of dual maintenance if you will there management if you will there but for the most part our end game is to drive that full adoption into agiloft itself but that is where the change management adoption comes into play critically important totally totally agree and so so a few more questions around around selection in our poll at the beginning we heard how important selecting that right vendor is finding a solution that's fit for the business need um so uh clearly you looked at a number of players in the market um and and you selected your loft as a as as your chosen vendor if you could list there may be the top two or three um reasons why from a functional perspective why you went with agile off i mean i heard agility as being obviously one of the key ones so that change management agenda that you have is so so so important and that reflected across many of our membership too so clearly that's an important one anything else that you put into that basket of important things that you that made agile stand out for you yes great question i think uh you know almost re-emphasizing the the agility benefit if you will again our ability to be nimble and support continuous change in this area and cost was a driver of that as well because one thing if you've been part of you know large scale erp roll outs those aren't always fun and that's you know sarcastically saying that it's not fun at all exactly and so so when it came to the area of contract life cycle management um there was not going to be the support and sponsorship to have another large-scale type rollout approach to how we did this as miles alluded to big bang uh usually results in a big bang and so we we needed to have that ability to be flexible and and have a solution that was in place that really required almost an a no code approach in terms of our ability to configure and change and shift for uh this because as we've seen even with you know coveted recently last year resulted in a lot of change and so that means processes had to quickly change and and there were contracts and things that had to be rolled out and effectively uh driven in a prompt manner and having a solution that has that ability to be configurable and nimble is is everything and that was that was you know some of the things that but those key factors of of cost uh um you know agility uh and that ability really to just be nimble and on the fly do roll outs that's not so heavy that you have to then stand up a separate project of a team and and resources that you have to pull from but something that you can run and manage um in a in a very uh lean fashion uh was was very critical absolutely um so again lots of questions still coming in about about features and functions um the the technology was it a cloud-based solution or is it on premise oh good question yeah it's a cloud-based uh solution uh i think i think i i heard somebody say the other day cloud is one you only have on-premise solutions now if uh if there's a real you know business imperative to store your data locally right um you know if if an air-gapped cloud solution works for the department of defense in the u.s then i think you can make it work anywhere right and i think that's the key the the the um pushback is around you know how secure and and uh you know how secure and locked down uh can you have it especially with such sensitive information and and that's something that is is absolutely of the most criticality right no totally totally very very interesting um so um let's there's questions around language and local legislation clearly you're a global player so regulation language all play into your into your culture as a corporation um has that been a barrier to adopting a universal agile process around your contracting framework that's a question from george yes um when and i would say we don't really have uh a universal uh while i say global it's it's kind of regionally global regional if you will in terms of theirs there there are exceptions and challenges that um and are different you know so some things in terms of manufacturing out of the you know the market versus some of the things that we would do out of our asia region being headquartered in seoul korea and so some of the operations there as well completely different and require a different uh legal input and perspective many regulations from a country by country perspective um can be unique and so we have to have that ability to support those nuances and we aren't one that has kind of built a centralized approach we we do by nature have to be flexible in that regard so not we're not quite there i think we're still building and and growing in regards to how how uh globally aligned and centralized can we be sure fascinating it's really interesting how how your experiences relate so clearly to to the experiences of other members that i that i have worked with um we have we have a stack more questions but but we've also got some some other really important areas to cover so so we'll come back to the questions but let's let's do progress so what you've shown here is is a focus on outcomes which is an absolutely a stellar approach to make this a successful deployment because you've identified exactly what's needed notwithstanding the conversation we've had and maybe we'll continue to have around metrics so share with the audience please what have you learned in this process one and two what next great question uh in terms of what we learned as as we started off change management change management change management and really getting in front of that of understanding what is that awareness of our organization around contract life cycle management um is there a desire to change do they deserve or are as an organization do they see that there is a problem there to be solved so our one of the challenges is from a legal perspective there is a very clear challenge and need for even some of our sourcing and procurement professionals there is a clear challenge in need organizationally not so much contracts come and go and some we may not some in areas they won't revisit contracts until three years at a time and so it's not a it's not a heavily uh volume driven spot to where that attention is there so really driving the why and the the benefit is key internally and getting that alignment and change management was something that um we kind of took more of a stick approach than um than trying to really provide the carrot of here's some value inefficiencies so that's been something that's been learning which really kind of led into what's next you know focusing heavily on how do we improve the experience of our solutions to make it more enticing to the users how do we really build in uh and course correct on some of the change management aspects but how do we constantly build in a an element of learning and training again we'll have people that use the the tool frequently and that go through the solution frequently and some that do it uh on a sporadic basis so how do you keep fresh in understanding uh what what's needed um integration with our you know core erp so that we truly have a uh source to pay um uh lifeline if you will and and how that aligns to even our contracts so that we don't get into the um realm of we we did the contract and we set it aside and never revisit or never look at it never hold anyone accountable and so it's it's that's where a lot of that alignment and planning is coming in so in terms of next steps we're doing a lot of focus now on how are we integrated across our broad broader solutions so that we can truly have one place of reference source of the truth and commonality across processes so a lot of its relationship building uh familiarity of solutions so for better adoption so training materials and those type of things so would have liked to have jumped on that at the beginning as an initial strategy and plan but that's one of the things that i'd say we earned but also what we're now what we're trying to do about it what are you going to do about it we're going to try to get better because when you know better you do better and and that's the approach we're taking lots of questions around that integration you know clearly the ability to integrate the clm platform into other parts of your it system stack is mission critical geronimo asks how would you describe the interfaces to your company's erp system um assuming that you've you've made some progress with integration already what worked well what lessons did you learn yeah it's it's something that you know we're continuing uh to build in frame up but something that we have to be intentional about and you need to know a lot of times you kind of go from one extreme to the other uh in terms of the level of integration that's needed and and having key conversations of what information do you really need to have uh integrated what's the frequency of it um that's where a lot of our conversations went in and in our case um it's easy to kind of go down on a path of we need a real time integration and seamless you know multi you know bi-directional if you will and in some cases we said you know what what what's good enough kind of what's that mvp that minimum viable product that we can say this is really what we need to be effective so that we're not overextending in terms of our investment for little return you know it's that is that agility and flexibility not just in the implementation of the interface but in the tool itself that's that's hugely important and that flexibility is vital for companies like yours that want this holistic view across the multiple departments and the multiple systems that they're using and the divisions across the world so so miles tell us how does agiloft deliver that flexibility for its multiple stakeholders yeah absolutely and if we can move to the next slide emma that'd be great i mean one of the things that we came out in the poll right is um people are are working through how to select a solution and then getting stakeholder buy-in and so i think in that process it's really important to you know understand the stakeholders and the value that they're trying to get from a clm so you know we start with the general counsel and you know what is what does the general counsel care about risk mitigation is huge for the the legal department uh one example in today's world is force major clauses with regard to your company's obligations you know you would want to know which of our contracts have forced major clauses that could potentially mitigate the risk of our company you know in a pandemic era or which of our suppliers have forced major clauses that could be a risk to us right i think without a clm it's really hard to do that assessment and understand what the landscape of your contracts are and and so that risk analysis is something that the general counsel and the legal department is going to really want to get out of their clm on the other side of just mitigating risk corporate legal departments more and more are being tasked with being great partners to the business and enabling the the business to efficient efficiently achieve success and so for attorneys that means being able to quickly um you know review a contract approve it you know make any red lines or changes and not be sort of red tape for the business but but to really um you know move the ball forward on that initiative um also the legal department is trying to to be efficient and reduce the amount of time that attorneys are spending because attorneys are are not the the least expensive uh resources in the business and so being efficient with that time is also important to the legal department i think for the the chief procurement officer that you know one of the major things that procurement wants to get to is you know vendor management looking at getting everything that the company has bargained for understanding what's in those contracts and then having strong partnership conversations with key vendors to make sure that all of the obligations that the company has negotiated are being realized by the company and again a clm can be really helpful to have that really high high level view of of what's in your contracts and what are those obligations on the sales top side it's uh similar to to the general counsel right on that efficiency piece they want to be able to eliminate red tape quickly move uh move things through the process and get the deal done and then the cl the the cfo um and the chief information officer well the for the cfo what's really important is um understanding you know what are the things that could cause short-term and long-term revenue gaps or cost issues for the business again all of that is in in your contracts but um if you don't have a clm where you can quickly analyze that you can't be strategic and so you know i think just understanding what those stakeholders are trying to accomplish and being able to tell the story to those stakeholders about the value they'll get from implementing a clm can be really helpful in selecting a solution and then getting the buy-in from those stakeholders totally totally agree and it's important to engage with each of these stakeholders really as a separate an entity because they have these different expectations so how do you do that what does that look like in in agile yeah i mean donovan talked about you know having a no code platform and agility we don't have the time on this call to go through what all of those options are but one thing that i wanted to highlight is the dashboard uh capability in agiloft again this is a configurable system not a customized system that you need a bunch of tech resources so a system administrator can configure this it can be configured based on the needs of a different persona so some of the personas that we talked about in legal or in procurement or in sales operations and you can also deploy sort of templates across teams of users so that you can sort of quickly get that in front of your users or you can create a user-specific dashboard that will give that user the data that they need to see and you can also you know have that emailed or or sent to a user at the place where there they want to see it versus always having to log into an application and view the data which i think is a really critical part of data is how do you access it and and we certainly have that agility in the platform as well perfect perfect so visually stunning uh but that flexibility proves invaluable uh when the world changes overnight as it did you know last march um the commercial sector particularly from where i come from was was particularly hit hard but for many technology provided a way to not only keep the lights on but also to provide that really important path for moving forward so um certainly before the pandemic began the 64 were folks who were polled said that they had not invested in automation in any shape or form now during the pandemic 81 of the folks polled over 500 individual corporations said that they will be investing materially in automation in the next 12 months so so what we've seen as a basis of our research is the focus the energy put around the deployment of automation is increasing logarithmically as as as the as the months progress the c-suite now see as its laser focus now on the benefits that effective commercial contract management bring to the bottom line and how important the deployment of clm technology is to facilitate that rollout why now the train is leaving the station and you can't afford to be left behind if if the deployment of this clm technology enables your competitors to improve operations by tenfold you're not going to be in business much longer if you don't jump on that train too the good thing is barriers to entry when i started deploying clm tools 10 years ago they were inordinately expensive and hard to deploy now cloud-based the cost per contract is much much much lower than it was even a year ago and the reality is take a look at our at our software comparison tools at world commerce and contracting there are literally hundreds of vendors in this space that offer quality products so what you've heard from from donovan today in terms of how to approach stakeholder engagement and how to build a creditable plan and how to progress a deployment these are these are nuggets of of important learning that will that will immediately transfer into the deployment of us clm solution for you so um miles though is this what you're seeing too from an agile perspective without all the other engagements that you have with your corporate clients yeah absolutely i mean um the point you made about businesses are approving um you know the business case for clm i mean we're we're very busy our sales team is very busy and i think the point you made about you know compet competitors in the market i mean for those on the call your competitors are um likely looking at a clm just because it's so prevalent right now and so it's a it's a hot area um it's definitely and and also with with uh covid there are areas where businesses are cutting back we know that right but there are also areas where businesses are investing and clm is an area where a lot of businesses are are investing right now so it's definitely something to be aware of so donovan does this thanks miles does this resonate with you is this is this what what you've seen internally within within your corporation as well uh i would say absolutely uh that's been something that is a desire uh and and push from it from the standpoint of where we'd like to go yes brilliant brilliant brilliant okay so we have a stack of questions to get through so i suggest that what we do is we we go into our into our q a slot um so a question from uh oh from anonymous actually but it's a great question anyway um what role did the agile off third party consultant play in your implementation donovan how how useful was it to have a third party in there um very useful it's been it's been extremely helpful and the thing that we've been fortunate with is the consultant that was there from day one on our first implementation um is still connected and with us today and so we that that's where a lot of that understanding and alignment of where our intent was uh when we started down this path as we evolve where we're going um there's there's at least someone from an agile off perspective that understands here's how this customer has shifted and evolved and it's helped in terms of providing even some insight into here's some ideas because here's where agiloft is going and what could be a benefit to where you're now where your strategy now is heading so um a little bit long-winded on on that answer but very valuable uh in essence yeah we'll keep them coming um firing as fast as we can so sharon asks kill a question how has getting your contracts under control help the whole company again i think just be risking not having that control you can you end up doing redundancy kicks in uh heavily you end up doing the same thing um in multiple different iterations over and over again and it and it leads to your ability to say you know what here's what we have established here's a place to refer to so that we know has this been done before and from a legal perspective they're constantly being pressed in charge and so the ability to not have to ask them for every minutia type question it frees them up again to do uh what they're there to do and so i i think uh you know in essence it's definitely been something that's been helped you know one of the concerns that i hear echoed through some of our members too is you know technology is replacing my job now now i hear that loud and clear and i actually applaud good fantastic let's bring in automation if we don't somebody else will but that then is that does that mean that those commercial and contract resources are going to get made redundant absolutely categorically not it enables those resources then to do the things that human beings are actually good at innovation relationship building and management helping feeding those contracts to be the very very lifeblood of business is that is that what you see too i absolutely see that and i would say it even gives us the ability to better manage um i've seen some of the questions here around uh you know whether it be performance management or you know as we're looking at kpis and i i can't necessarily speak definitively to each of those points from our company's perspective but what i can say is that that statement of where that automation helps us then focus where we need to focus a lot of times we spend the time uh with with professionals that are geared to negotiate certain deals are spending more administrative time just getting the paper pushed as opposed to i'm now focused on uh the terms and conditions and what are the key clauses that i need to watch out for how am i driving that performance of that either that supplier or you know partner that we're working with how can i think differently about uh different types of partnership and deals that we can put in place that inability to uh focus at that level is what um automation unlocks and so i too would echo we don't want to throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater when we see some of the advancements in technology for what you know can really help unlock the potential of our business indeed geronimo says we will not be replaced by acting as quality managers in the commercial space right uh a question from david david says did you implement your company contracting workflows so from your own design or did you use uh agiloth recommended out of the box workflows or was it a bit of both uh it was a little bit of both um but i will say um a lot of it was our own processes and trying to get our workflows embedded into the toolset looking back i i do wish we would have leveraged some of the out-of-the-box workflows best practice if you will um that because again we were doing what we thought was best for us but we also were taking doing it from a naive approach um we we had decision makers that didn't understand some of the nuances and of of contract management and so it's it's been something that again that evolved learning uh even back to you know if i were to do it again some things i would have said hey let's align our process to some of these best practices that would probably be more wise than us saying well here's the way we've done it let's just make it fit and and and we did that in some cases you know to our dutchman right still still lots of questions around around a metric so let me see if i can sort of encapsulate multiple questions in into one so um when you are trying when you assess um say a risk profile or some kpi um uh in in a combination of of across a combination of contracts um have you developed a series of if you like master kpis that that project risk profile or profitability or something else associated with that portfolio of contracts do you have sort of master kpis to a degree we are working towards kind of where's um are we in a spot where the majority of our spend is relegated to a small percentage and so focusing on these key uh relationships uh will actually yield a stronger return and so no so understanding the um impact span volume um of the different you know suppliers which correlate to that contract so reporting by the categorization of our contracts uh the type of our contracts that we're dealing with we are building out metrics to really kind of extrapolate that trend you know what are some of the trends that we're seeing um you know area to area uh and to some degree contract to contract so that we can constantly drive drive improvement well gentlemen where where did that hour go what a fascinating conversation donovan and miles thank you so much for that that was really really interesting um thank you as as i say the hour just evaporated um so thanks to our audience for staying with us thanks for some really penetrating and interesting questions and thank you donovan and miles for your very very interesting responses so just remains for me to say thank you uh to the to the team here thank you to adolf for partnering on this webinar and there are other uh angelo f webinars as part of this series so so please do check them out and just remains for me to say and do enjoy the rest of your day thank you for your attention today and goodbye