Automate your sales contract process for support

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good morning good afternoon and good evening uh my name is paul branch and i am the chief operating officer here at the iaccm and it is my pleasure to to welcome two colleagues uh to talk to you today about contract management best practices in the new normal you know we've all seen and experienced indeed the the pandemic and the impact that it's had on our day-to-day lives both uh professional and personal and so today um it's it's gonna be really interesting uh set of uh discussions i hope um we've got two speakers um brian who's senior director of procurement operations at kindred at home now brian's a practitioner in contract and commercial management and we're going to hear from him from the horse's mouth so to speak as to as to his experiences of deploying contract life cycle management automation our second speaker john john from scout rfp john is uh is going to share with us a little bit more about the capabilities of the scout rfp product and you'll see how it segues and supported the set of business requirements uh that brian brian shared with us so in our agenda for today after some some of our our brief introductions um i will um share with you some of our research findings um iaccm as you know is engaged in a lot of research particularly at the moment um but is um is uh keen i'm keen to share those those with you um uh once we've once we've gone through the the research um i'll hand off to our colleagues and and for the for the meat of it brian's going to share his experiences of um of of working in in deploying a clm automation capability and john's then going to going to share some of his experiences of working with multiple clients in deployment of this technology so as mark said at the beginning please do ask questions as we go um there's some particularly knowledgeable speakers today so let's take advantage of their of their experience and uh and they'll be happy to share uh with our members today so before we get into the meat though um let's look at our key findings and changes since the last time we reported on the on the impact of the pandemic our research not surprisingly i guess really reflects what's happening in the wider economy we're seeing a much more significant assessment of the impact so up from 19 to 79 percent and an increasing indeed are reporting a moderate to severe impact of the of the coronavirus epidemic and the the flow is moving across the globe so while some jurisdictions are now starting to come out of lockdown others are are regrettably um much earlier on in the wave so we're now seeing that africa and the middle east are being much more severely impacted than they were previously so what we're going to look at today is how um how the the impacts of the of the of the pandemic are driving different thinking in the clm and automation space one thing one thing i'd like to share with you before we move off this slide um is on the bottom row there 84 of professionals believe that they have the technology in place that they need to work from home however what we also know is that a number a large number of those in fact north of 80 percent are also looking to make investments in the technology either at either uh to refresh what they already have to augment what they already have or indeed to completely replace it so now is the time and i'm sure the the interest in this call is driven by the fact that that there are material benefits as we're about to hear material benefits from um engaging in this technology and and now is the time to to start to uh to optimize to start to deliver on some of those those business benefits so enough from me without further ado let me hand off to my colleague brian um from kindred at home brian over to you fantastic uh i just want to make sure you can hear me okay yes we can hear you fine thank you fantastic good so this is brian garcia the senior director of procurement operations for kindred at home uh i want to start off by giving everyone a little bit of a viewpoint in terms of our history and how we developed because i think it's it's critical to to our story so kindred at home is a relatively new company [Music] about a year and a half ago we split off from a parent organization uh and in doing so we actually ended up with you know all of our resources we have over 700 locations that provide in-home services in-home uh health services and in-home hospice services but we really did not get the the functions um the resources that go with the functions and a lot of the systems that go with those particular functions such as like finance and procurement and all that so we ended up having to build those from scratch um so in building those from scratch meant that we started by developing a procurement organization and looking for our tools as we went through this separation from our parent organization and set up and operationalizing our headquarters and our core functions to support what is really kind of three services we provide in the field so our home health services our community services and our hospice services and i want to bring that kind of piece of the story in because part of our separation meant that we also were separating contracts and contracts became a is a critical piece of our development as our own standalone organization because we had to go through the typical phases of identifying all the vendors that we would need to stand alone contracting with all those vendors in a really compressed time frame and then also being able to operationalize those contracts and manage those contracts long term and so as we developed our procurement team and we were doing all that work all of this was happening in parallel and so as you can imagine there's you know teams of people involved from different areas of specialty that are working on contracts coordinating with procurement coordinating with legal a lot of paper being signed there's also very critical decisions around duration of contracts and many of our contracts are on the shorter term duration just as we were setting things up we wanted to make sure we had the flexibility to continue to be nimble and change as we went through our first couple of years as an organization so a lot of our contracts were were shorter term and some of them you know very strategic suppliers that we identified initially you know those were given terms that were a little bit longer and had a little bit different kind of language to them so i think that's important background that's kind of what we were dealing with as we separated this the stand up of our own organization just you know terribly exciting also very stressful and also a just a mountain of work to set up a new organization so that's where we started um if we go to the next slide i can show give everyone insight into what we did from a procurement operations standpoint so you know this little graphic kind of just very simply lays out what we put into the scope for our procurement operations services and with that um we have a strategic component our category management we also have all of our operational services and our operational services are twofold there's a transactional piece and then there's also a strategic piece and a lot of this stuff you know we could do but not everything we had the tools for and one of those main areas where we were actually missing the tools was the contract management we basically were keeping track of another tool that didn't really have the functionality we needed it didn't have workflow it didn't have all the abstract data that we needed to properly manage our contracts and also just created a huge situation where we had limited visibility and so as we sort of stood up the organization and we defined these roles and scopes you know we had we could not stop the previous work so as many people out there you're you're fixing the car as the car is moving that sort of old analogy and and i can definitely see there was this wave of contracts being executed and they were sort of just being stuck into a repository that wasn't didn't necessarily have the intelligence that we wanted and so we started down this path of what's what are our needs in terms of contract management what do we hope to get out of our contract management tools we set this up and then how are we going to not only operationalize it but then also pull in all of these contracts that we're getting signed and develop a path for managing that so it was really you know it's a it's a green field for me which was fantastic um and so we we definitely went down through that path of software selection and if you want to go ahead and go to the next slide just before we move off there brian a question questions come in uh at the front end of your process how did you justify the business case for investment in your automation tools so that's a really good question um i would say there there's the way that we did it and then there's the the way that i would suggest that it's done um and i in my prior life before working at kindred at home i was actually on the consulting side and we saw this quite a bit the easiest way to justify it is to not only say that you're going to do a strategic sourcing initiative but also provide the tools in place for long term ensuring the results can be maintained or over time and so wrapping together a strategic strategic sourcing initiative with large savings with the tools to manage those savings is what i would say would be the preferred method um we actually do the timing and the pace that we were going at we did not do that we actually had done most of our sourcing up front and then we're left with okay well how do we how do we manage and justify the long term piece so when we got into that discussion one of the reasons that we chose scout was because we were trying to do a number of different things across our procurement operations services so our tracking of all of our savings our projects that we use to on the strategic side along with some of our vendor interaction and our contracts that functionality for us you know we have all that functionality and scout so the tool actually provides greater coverage than just the contract management piece we're talking about today because we were able to tie it to the savings tracking and the savings projects that provided a lot of wind behind our argument also on the risk component there was you know our team is a very very lean team so if you look at you know our head count for the size of organization that we actually are we have three people that are focused on more of our strategic stuff i've got a team of five people that handles all of the operational component and so when you start to divide that out there's just no way to manage contracts efficiently without having a tool to do it so it became a this is an essential piece of technology if we're going to keep the team the size that it is and be able to manage the contract volume that we have so competing argument really yeah yeah got it okay thank you thank you very good yeah so hi this is john um so as brian was saying i think all the challenges that he saw we also saw from a lot of our other customers right and so as he was saying that you know scout is not obviously just a contract tool um in fact we started off as being a pure procurement specific tool focused on rfps and as we talked to um our users just about their challenges a lot of sort of tangential effects of kind of contracting and that contracting process came up so words like black hole or frustration or leaky these are things that we heard quite often um so as we dug deeper um we came up with this contract module that's specifically there to help uh make the process of creating and tracking contracts easier so i mean that's that's actually the value that scout brings a lot of folks and it's great to hear that brian has uh has kind of the same understanding of it and really that's that's kind of value that software should bring to any of our users um speaking of value i think we have our first poll question yeah so let's let's run to the poll if we could so um the question is um how much value does your contract management technology provide when responding to pandemic issues so it's a question of basically in the in the here and now so high moderate or very little value none because you're currently looking into the contract management technology in an automation strategy but haven't got anything yet or none simply because you have no plans to invest in that in that space so um give that a couple more more seconds for us to uh to to make our votes and now mark if you could close the poll let's let's take a look at the results right so that's very interesting so that's a pretty even spread all things considered i guess a little bit more um in the moderate value um uh 20 ish in the high value um and then pretty much spread across the rest and interesting john what what do you think about that well certainly it's interesting that there there's a decent amount of folks that have no plans to invest uh the same as the high value side but yeah most folks seems to be in the middle right sort of um and honestly i think you know the experience from brian probably will will uh help a lot of these folks as well how do you get more value out of these things and if you're looking to uh implement contract management technology what are the things you should consider so this is actually pretty good and it's really interesting actually that some of our most recent research looked at the the the likelihood that folks would report um the criticality of a clm tool to their business processes and it was really interesting to see that those folks who had invested thought in a much much higher proportion thought that the clm automation technology was fundamental to their business survival whereas those that had not invested in the technology were nowhere near as sure about the criticality of the of the of the automation so interesting um and it creates i think an opportunity you know because for the folks 15 17 who who haven't who have no plans to invest on top of the 20 percent who are who are looking um creates a big opportunity for those to make to drive systemic improvements into into their operations so interesting yes to jump in here on this one so and only because i has made this change so rapidly from not having a tool to have any tool when when previous to scout we didn't have visibility to what was about to expire we didn't have reporting on what was about to expire we were in a very reactionary mode so vendors would call in and they would it would send us renewal forms or they would send us notices that you know contracts had renewed and you know the escalation had been had been utilized and we didn't we were basically reacting to news and we were too late to really have the value that we wanted to have but that was an internal procurement frustration you know the business didn't feel that um as much or didn't understand kind of the impact of that so we were always very reactionary which was from a procurement professional's perspective extremely frustrating now that we have a tool and we have reporting we're able to kind of get ahead of that curve whereas you know i would view us if i were to answer the poll myself is you know having high value here because i'm being proactive i'm ahead of the curve ahead of renewals and notices and i actually can do what a procurement person just naturally wants to do is just be able to influence an impact before these things are resigned or renewed or re-upped so we i've gone from our organization being at the very bottom no plans to invest convincing them it was valuable to you know i would now answer at the top high value interesting it doesn't yeah you can you can move from one end of the spectrum to the other quite fast very good okay okay brian let's uh let's move on thank you yeah so these you know i kept these goals in here for the presentation um in terms of what we wanted to do with the tool for kind of twofold these are goals that we wrote prior to the pandemic and these are things that we knew we needed to as an organization invest in these and drive these to increase our procurement maturity especially within the contracting space you know our information availability i talked just a second ago we went from having not the ability you know we had no visibility effectively to now i've got fantastic visibility at my fingertips that multiple people can run and have access to so we've we've really kind of succeeded and and that goal was the implementation of our contract tool with scout the ability to create a pipeline what that means for us is i wanted to know what people needed to work on and i wanted to know where it was in the cycle and having that then allowed from a central standpoint to either farm some of this stuff out so i can actually give it to someone who's in a functional role and have them work on a contract renewal or a new contract or i can have someone on my team in workflow having the ability to know where they are in the process of maybe abstracting that or following up on these contracts and so that was a big piece of it too the prioritization limited resources i mentioned earlier you know we've got a relatively small team i only have a handful of people in my procurement operations group and when you look at the number of locations we support that i think drives or can drive a lot of activities 700 locations there's a tremendous number of locations in terms of a you know decentralized workforce to support so having an understanding of what's going on and what they need our folks are relatively strapped and we purposely run a very tight team very lean team so having the ability to prioritize you know what's coming due or what's of most importance and to manage those resources through the tool as opposed to trying to manage it without a tool you know that prioritization piece was extremely important to us i think as you get down to some of our other objectives in terms of managing risk everyone says they want to manage risk and it doesn't necessarily get a lot of leadership time in some organizations until you have something like a pandemic in which case risk all of a sudden is at the very top you know which one of these vendors are our approved vendors that we have contracts with which of these vendors are vendors that maybe fall in a different area of your uh vendor profiling that are kind of secondary or at least approved and which ones are you moving out saying you know what these guys are not people we're going to use again so the risk piece through the pandemic i think soared to the very top of this list versus like the negotiation results through the pandemic and bear in mind i'm in a healthcare organization we're buying ppe for frontline workers the negotiation results were what was more important was the availability of product not necessarily the cost of product so our negotiations definitely shifted what was the priority there um but i'm managing risk in terms of making sure we have product availability making sure we're working with the right people that we had the right contracts and we could trace it back you know became all of a sudden paramount and then also just a long term kind of boosting our efficiency and leverage you know that was a goal at the beginning of the year i did not realize though how critical that was going to be during the pandemic so when we started this process we had a lot of our procurement leadership involved in contract management you know our category directors and we've got two of them plus a vp they manage the contracts um they had to keep track of you know what were the expiration dates what was going on with them what was the status and that took a lot of leadership bandwidth we put scout in place it all of a sudden gave us the ability to work within a really well-structured tool that a lot of the stuff that the leadership previously was doing on their own laptops and excel files and all of a sudden can be automated it can be refreshed on a weekly basis or a daily basis and could also be pushed down within our own procurement team so that some of my you know lower level employees could handle handle these tasks because there was a structure in place to do it that gave us tremendous amount of leverage because during the pandemic being healthcare our leadership within the procurement team was 100 focused on availability of supply of ppe and all the stuff that we had planned to do around contract management they no longer could support but with the tool in place we were able to take all that activity and shift it down the chain and now i have procurement operations resources you know actually doing the what's available you know what needs to be renewed what's the status what's our data quality my team in procops was able to actually do all this activity because we had they now have this structure which was you know a big unanticipated benefit that we were going to need during the pandemic really interesting we'll go ahead and go to the next slide so in terms of operationalizing this i mean we have our goals and we as an organization felt good at the beginning of the year because our our launch date with with the tool or launch date with scout was actually january 1st and so as we got into it the one thing that we found was there were a lot more contracts that we even knew about so managing our data became you know a very big early focus this year that was not necessarily intended we did most of our contract abstract and perhaps load into this tool in the fall and we thought we had you know for the most part we've gotten all of our contracts in what we found as soon as we turned the tool on and we actually started using it and sharing it and inviting more people to use the tools that we inadvertently contracts have been stored in different repositories that we were not necessarily aware of so we created this routine which and again this is something that i was able to push down through my organization different repositories were starting to be reviewed by my team members and those contracts were being imported into into our tool into scout and so not only did the number of contracts grow the accuracy of the data we got to now see across all of our contracts you know what was the data what were the terms so there are some things that we know we need to fix in our contract template there's also some things that just in the data itself that we we saw that needed to be fixed and then also maintenance and maintenance routines are going to be very important so that first one there the routines around managing your data and structure and we did that for the first part of the year on a daily basis uh we had a couple resources that were reviewing contracts that were looking through running reports looking for anomalies and going back and correcting data and that's that's going to be something that's going to continue for us in the long term just because we want to make sure that data accuracy is there so that's super important the the second piece to develop the weekly contract management routine that is something that we've done as a leadership team always which was hey what's the big contract that needs to be renewed or negotiated when we track that well it's no longer just the high visibility ones it's now a comprehensive list so we have someone on my procoss team who runs a weekly report on monday and we've got flags in the tool that tell us when contracts should be reviewed by procurement and those dates are well in advance of any sort of renewal notice some of those dates are six months nine months out from a renewal because that's how long we anticipate would take us to renegotiate and transition to a new supplier if that was necessary um but those dates are all specific to the contract so as we loaded contracts we created a procurement flag you know this is a procurement needs to review flag and and then now on a weekly basis i have someone that pulls a report that says all right what are all the contracts this week that need review and then that person then coordinates with the business coordinates with the category director to say is there action that's needed and if there is then we track it until that activity is completed so that weekly piece there is is now part of our dna in terms of what we do day in and day out managing monitoring and managing contracts and giving people advanced notice so we can be successful and and the fact that i can have that done during the pandemic and that routine continues to run in the background that was key to us and the last one is our kind of our longer term strategic piece you know because we are looking at things on a much longer horizon than we did before we're able to be proactive and so you know we're scheduling deep dives as suppliers we're looking for new opportunities and we can do that because we run the analytics on the tool we can run the analytics on our contract database to see you know where is our opportunity or who needs to have a review who was the last time we had a review with that supplier and so those things were able to stay on top of a lot lot easier but that's something that again we've got resources on my procurement operations team that are supporting and driving that and then helping my category director know where to focus this time and so those routines have just become part of our proc offs normal course of business which has been fantastic um because in all honesty those have run with very little oversight for myself as i've been focused on endemic focused activities and so you know my team has taken these and run with them uh which they would not have been able to do before so go ahead and go to the next slide right so we now have our second poll question uh and the poll is as follows what is your most strategic driver for contract management going forward um and now is it data analytics and business intelligence is it driving incremental cost savings managing risk supply chain transparency or simplifying digitizing processes um the challenge i had here was to select just one but uh it is your most strategic driver so if you could keep that in mind so looking forward what's uh what's your most pressing thing that you need to address um let's leave the poll open for just a couple more seconds um we have some questions coming in but but may i just take this opportunity to to remind you that if you'd like to ask questions of our panelists today please do use the questions tab simply type in your question and we'll be able to address it when we get to our question session so okay let's mark let's close the poll and let's take a look at the results right um interesting yeah i was i was um i was expecting a certainly a focus in analytics and in cost savings um but interesting to brian's comment about the the importance of risk and risk moving to the top of the agenda risk obligations tracking jeopardy management responding to the consequences of of issues whether they're obligations or not is obviously a key component so interesting that that's reflected there on the the risk piece i wonder if we were to rerun this poll six months months from now how sticky the the risk issue is i mean i think the pandemic has definitely forced that to the top um but i i'm curious you know in the long term how much risk remains on the top of the priority list that would say for for myself as i look at the results the data analytics piece you know becomes an enabler to a lot of different things so for myself i would have rated the data analytics you know probably as my top priority just because i view it as an enabler to a lot of strategic activity right are you guys surprised that supply chain is so so low on the list given given actually yes i am really given given the the issues that we've seen and the consequence of our research which says folks are really focused on on reviewing distance sourcing and bringing it closer or or in sourcing things that are currently outsourced you know there's a lot of there's a lot of energy and focus 34 if i remember the stat right of respondents to our last survey we're really thinking about in sourcing things so i can give you guys a very recent and this is within the last couple of weeks and it's related to the pandemic on the supply chain transparency it's a much broader issue than just contracts but if folks have paid attention to what the cdc and the federal government have been recommending in terms of protective gear that the the guidelines have changed throughout the pandemic at the very beginning of the pandemic there was this issue of no one had enough inventory and so guidelines were set and guidelines were a little bit more lacks at the very beginning and then as we've seen time go on and supply chains start to replenish the guidelines have gotten a little more restrictive and so what that's done though is it's put some manufacturers into play and then it's taking those manufacturers out of play so depending on when during the pandemic you're looking that manufacturer may or may not be approved for providing a piece of equipment so if you don't have transparency to the actual skew number of that equipment and where you got it from and who manufactured it you actually don't know if that's an approved piece of equipment at this point in time so supply chain transparency can be super important during the pandemic but it's also it's it's much beyond just contract management it's inventory management yeah i also wonder that you know maybe it's a competition with all the other uh good options that are on this page right so you know if you don't have a simplified digitalized process or if you don't have that business intelligence you might not be worrying about supply chain just quite yet that's also true okay john i think we should i think we should move on yeah absolutely yeah so that was very interesting i mean that's a great segue into uh talking about the scalp product a little bit um uh great drivers and hopefully like a lot of our customers are seeing those drivers going to play out using scout as well um so as i was saying before you know we really uh came up the contract module by talking to our customers and understanding how they think about their problems and how they want to handle certain things so we came up with these design principles and these are principles that you'll see kind of throughout the scalp product not just in not just in contracts right so um efficiency savings and this is to lebron was talking about earlier just about justifying the the spend in new technology visibility uh and adoption um so efficiency really is all about just being flexible and being able to adapt to new circumstances we also have a lot of collaborative collaborative tools within our product to help teams kind of get together uh and share information um savings is pretty self-explanatory hopefully and and that is that you're actually getting a return to the investment in our product right so you're actually seeing um scene contracts kind of pop up more that you don't let them expire more there's no penalties you understand what the saving goals are visibility having a clear view this really relates to transparency in our in our world um where you know instead of having critical documents or information within someone's laptop or someone's drive and that that you really let the right information come to the right people and then lastly adoption easy to use is a huge part of how we design scout we really do believe that you know if you don't have a lot of your organization that need to use the tool using the tool you'll inevitably have those kind of silos out there where visibility and all the other stuff really isn't as possible um so you can go to the next slide here and i'll talk a little more specifically about how these principles kind of come to just our contract module um so we have built in and everything here is is really geared towards having something that's simple um and uh and able to track and manage our customers obligations right so being able to streamline communications and that's within your own team um or even with the suppliers on our supply portal um having a construct for contracts and hierarchy that's easy to set up and easy to understand and supporting a lot of the workflows that may be specific to your organization so a lot of these things are super configurable depending on how how your organizations are set up so we've certainly noticed that everyone is a little bit different everyone manages contracts a little bit differently um i mean the automation part uh is is uh front and center for sure in just being able to proactively manage your contracts or renewals making sure that you're notified when something comes up and needs your attention and that could be because of milestones delayed or because you know contract is really about to expire really needs renewal um and overall you know our aim is to is to increase the impact of a sourcing team right so and i'll kind of generalize that and say that sourcing and contracting teams depending on how your org is structured um to the whole business so there's a lot of things that uh um you know when we talk to our customers that they uh they can improve and try to fill some of these gaps um and and be more productive um and so that that is certainly our goal with our with our product here so the next slide um there is a little video that will show that gives you a little bit of a demo um this is our contract we call workbench um so within the workbench you have all sorts of contracts and varying statuses things that need attention things that need approval things that might be soon to expire um and every single one of these contracts is not just the document itself but also just the entire processes around it and on this workbench you can filter for certain things and manage it how you want and save certain views um you can do this by who's assigned to it and uh who's responsible for these things or by anything else that you want um within each contract there's sort of the the metadata if you will all of the um the parameters that go into a contract but also a lot of the processes that are involved in getting a contract approved and signed within your own org right so so very easily you can add in milestones like uh the video is doing here and set a date and set an assignee and and certainly you can do a lot of other things with attachments dragging and dropping documents in here a lot of this is very customizable as well uh you can um you see on the left side a lot of different tabs and categories a lot of those can be made up by you depending on what your processes are um you can certainly relate things and see relationship trees within the contracts as well i'll let this run a little longer um so here's the approval tab but obviously there's supplier information that you can drag in we have a supplier portal as well and right now this demo is sending the contract itself through an approval process and it will generate essentially an approval retreat based on i think in this example it was dollar amount but it could be by category by anything else and and the user can very easily approve it or reject it depending on how it is and in terms of communication uh the team chat is a function that a lot of our folks love um you can very easily talk to the team that's responsible for this contract and uh and there's usually there's a lot of a lot of text in there in my example it's just a just one liner but but it really helps teams get together and talk about what they need to do to get a contract across to across the line great thank you um the next couple are just to just screenshots in case our video doesn't work out here it's always good to be prepared oh yeah exactly just as you never know with technology right exactly all right so the last thought i have here i'll talk a little bit about just the the big news for scout at least um it should impact um our customers in the short term but workday um acquire scout earlier this year um and the vision there is really to have a full end-to-end um you know source to pay type of um workflow right so right now as you may know if you're a scout customer or if you are familiar with our tools that we do a lot of things within the sourcing side the supplier performance side contract management like we've been talking about today and workgate also has a contract management side as well it's a little bit different than ours um but a very uh very nicely fits in with the things that we're doing and so we're working on connectors between the two products um so that our customers can utilize all of the workday functions and their financial tools on their cm tools around purchasing checking out contracts and spend sense right and then then having a lot of that uh transactional part that uh that scout currently does not have um and so this is gonna be a great solution all put together uh and it hopefully brings a lot of value to our customers where they don't have to jump back and forth between different products and kind of worry about the integration piece um so i think to you know sum it all up i think um it's a lot of the scout um prerogative is just continue to bring value to our customer users right the workday piece is one part but we continue to add a various uh functionalities um particularly seeing how you know the drivers that you guys have mentioned today and try to build a lot of those things into our product they can't claim to be perfect on all those things right now um so we also saw the value that brian kind of brought up about features like automation and facilitating communications within the team and just tracking and storing managing contracts with a tool that's easy to use and just easily adoptable um that brings a lot of value hopefully um to everyone's org but but as we heard today to brian's work for sure and and you know we didn't design any of this to just predict for a pandemic or anything like that but it's good to hear that all those things that we think is valuable uh and make your process more robust is uh is still working out right and it probably is particularly valuable in the in these crazy times um so brian i want to thank you for sharing your experience i think it's certainly valuable for me and hopefully uh to others as well um absolutely so um i think let's let's move on to onto questions we have we have a number of questions coming in um and then guys there'll almost certainly be there'll be an opportunity to to sum up at the end so uh some questions for you though brian um around your implementation how long did it take you to to implement your your solution yeah i can definitely go over that so we actually signed the contract late august early september um we would plan to in order to kick off what i would consider to be our design of our implementation which is really around our configuration of the implementation we started that at the end of october so really it took us in terms of what our configuration needed to be from the end of october until the end of december so around two months a large part of that time is more downtime that we were looking at our own data abstracting data that we wanted to put into the system in order to get it ready to go for a january first launch what i will say i learned from that process though is if i had to do it all over again i would launch the solution much faster because what i found is the data entry into the solution itself is much easier in the solution than it is to try to abstract contracts um into some sort of other excel sheet and then to upload it just because it's so much more native in the solution to key in the data so my advice would be you can configure and send the solution up in you know a matter of days that i would do that first and then it would work on the data entry piece so i did most of my what i thought was most of my abstract prior to launch i would flip that i would configure it i would launch it i would start to use it i would have the abstract happen after that because what we also found was it's so easy and scout to add a data field to change data fields to you know make configuration changes we changed a ton after we went live and it was we just you know on a daily basis we were adjusting to make it work better for our business and was easy to do interesting um and for you for you john um do all the stakeholders need licenses for your product to view simply data within the tool like the status of their contracts so so now uh so there are a lot of stakeholders within a system that are that do not require a license um so there's certain functionalities that's that's not you know open to just any stakeholder but in terms of if you're a business and you want to do a request right into a project or a contract um and you want to kind of continue to track that contract uh those folks do not need a license very cute i will say that just to add on to that that was a huge benefit for us so i've got a relatively small procurement team that has the full access but then i've got legal i.t functional people that all have you know effectively it's not just a read only because they can make edits and add content but they don't have full access and and those those licenses you know are charged for that's that's fantastic because i have the ability to show anybody in the organization who needs access which is awesome uh so so this is not rehearsed so you can shoot me afterwards um but one of the um one of the my observations having gone through this the automation loop several times in previous employers um is the amount of energy that that's required around integration into other systems within your system stack so brian did you have that issue to to to to deal with or is this a standalone clm tool uh there was a decision we had to make early on uh and you know i kind of laid a little bit of the background that we're a new organization we were standing up a lot so every function was going through that same process our our it team was completely invested in you know other critical systems so they were not available that was one of the key drivers to going with a solution like scout was procurement on its own could set this up it was web-based didn't require me to get the it team involved i didn't integrate with anything else which also allowed me to do this now as opposed to have to wait and be put on the i.t schedule very good do you have any plans to do any integrations later on down the pike or not uh we don't and actually i don't know that it's necessary for us you know given that we've we have several hundred suppliers um you know each of those has their own contracts but because we take things from an idea for savings through all of our sourcing activities in the solution to the contract itself um and then we write our pos in a separate system and so that's sort of a natural break so we don't have any plans to fully to integrate it further in the in the future we did we did set up octa from just a login perspective but that was a super simple interface and it was it was super helpful to do also gotcha uh yeah if you can avoid that level of integration it's certainly uh incredibly expensive and time consuming to get that piece right which was intr i was intrigued um how you did a because a turn up of a couple of months and to your point maybe even a couple of days is quite phenomenal uh with that with that number of suppliers so that's that's very interesting indeed um so we've got a so i think i think we covered austin's question um what is the integration like with your erp system um basically there isn't one i think that's that's the that's the summary that's correct we write our pos and our erp system we put our contracts into scout the two aren't integrated right gotcha gotcha gotcha so so so john do you is that is that a typical implementation with your clients or do you see folks who muted integration we do see clients do the integration but that is typical of our clients right because i think one of the things that is great about scout is that it you can come online very quickly so um and in terms of in folks like brian their functions um scout kind of already supports everything that they do we need to do there are other things that they can do in other systems that don't require integration that's one of the keys to get it up and running and going pretty quickly but we obviously do have um apis available for that integration of uh if folks do kind of yeah speed and cost right yeah absolutely and like you said well like i think it adds certainly a lot more time um you generally need some either your i.t department to be involved or a consultant or something like that that wants to design a system rather than just use one particular tool right can i add something to that though paul sure go ahead the you know while i don't have the system connected to our erp what i do have in scout though is i have my supplier list that i manage contracts for all of my contracts all of my sourcing activity is in there already along with my negotiations and pricing so it also allows me to put projects in there so my projects whether they are strategic projects that are driving savings or their tactical projects that we have done quick negotiation on my whole project pipeline is in there so i have you know the ability to export and create dashboards out of scout for my projects my pipeline my savings and the contracts that i have related to them so i have quite a bit of integration because all that stuff is native and scout so all that stuff is together okay with an eye to the time guys um i think if i could hand back first to brian and then to john for some uh some final comments yeah so final comments um from me is just looking at how long it took us we put a lot of thought into it i think we don't know we didn't know we didn't know tools like scout are so flexible stand it up faster focus on all of the inputting of data after you've split it up and people really get to get into the tool because you will change stuff you learn stuff and it's just a much faster process once you have it in there that's my biggest that's my big takeaway excellent thank you thank you brian uh and john yeah so i mean it's so this has been great it's great to kind of work with brian on doing implementation and seeing the impact that we're making in the organization right so um and it's the same with all of our other customers as well and we continue to kind of develop additional features to make things easier to use have more functionality but not increase complexity um so those are our goals for sure i mean i think going forward we'll continue to work on that great okay well gentlemen um thank you thank you both for a really interesting and insightful presentation today um so best practices from brian i heard routine is key so that certainly resonated with me and it's really interesting to see how how technology can really support the um the the business case and the and the business requirements and how scout rfp fills that spot so to john and to brian thank you both very much indeed and to our audience today thank you for thank you for listening and thank you for all the great questions and i hope you found this this session today useful so uh with that let's draw this one to a close so thank you very much thanks for your attention and goodbye thank you guys