Signature Service Speaker Agreement Template – BaseCRM Version Made Easy

Signature service speaker agreement template basecrm version

a warm welcome to all our attendees today thank you for joining us on this webinar topic for today's discussion is faster contracts better contracts eliminating the friction points in contracting my name is ajay agarwal founder and ceo of sirion labs and i'll be your host for today before we get started here are a couple of housekeeping items the webinar slides and the recording will be emailed to all the attendees and uh assuming that you have questions we'd love for you to ask them in the chat panel on the webinar panel on your right on the right hand side of your screen next slide please here's a quick overview of the organizations participating today i think morgan stanley and vodafone need no introduction at all as the leading financial services firm and the leading telco in the world today wcc is uh also an organization that needs no introduction at least those of you who are attending the call today uh as the leading organization in commercial contracting worldwide uh probably i come from the smallest and the least known of the entities which is cerion labs uh which is a leading enterprise impact management clm software technology firm and hopefully you'll get a chance to find out a little more about us as we move forward today next slide please let me quickly go over what we're going to cover today uh we're going to talk a little about what the friction points are what the hot spots are in the contracting life cycle from signing and negotiating negotiating and signing contracts to monitoring the promises inside them we're going to explore at a high level what the role of artificial intelligence and machine learning are in navigating these friction points effectively we're also going to give you a quick preview into the friction point index which is jointly being designed by world cc and by sirion labs and which will cover in greater detail on subsequent uh webinars so that's the agenda for today and without further ado let me introduce you to our distinguished speakers all means is vice president at morgan stanley he is a lawyer in their technology and data legal group his areas of legal coverage include information management social media usage and u.s regulatory requirements associated with vendor supplier relationships paul is leading an effort at morgan stanley to analyze and enhance the processes for drafting and negotiating contracts and to connect the contracting process to upstream and downstream systems data and processes prior to joining morgan stanley paul was a lawyer in the financial institutions group at davis spoke and wardwell thank you for joining us next is that left schultz that left also needs very little introduction as one of the most visible procurement leaders in your last 20 years uh as the of the board of the vodafone procurement company he is a seasonal executive with global experience across multiple industry sectors he joined vodafone in 2003 to lead their global supply chain eventually heading and founding and heading the luxon based luxembourg-based vodafone company vpc he stepped down from this role as ceo of bpc in 2016 but still continues to serve as the chairman of board of directors and prior to vodafone he has held leadership roles in supply chain operations at uh applied materials and at siemens in germany u.s korea and singapore welcome third we have third we have tim cummins who is the president and founder of world commerce and contracting needs very little introduction as little contracting thinkers in the world today he is the founder and president of wcc he was inspired to start word cc by his work at ibm corporation where he led the global re-engineering of the contracting processes and the commercial organization under the leadership of luke his research and influence have been recognized through appointment as a professor of international commercial and contract management in the school floor at the university of leeds and in 2019 as the winner of the financial times market shaper award welcome and very pleased to have you here next slide please i'd like to now invite debt left to commence and kick off today's discussion over to you thank you rj and thank you very much for having me today in these unprecedented times in today's uncertain and dynamic business environment organizations are obviously under a lot of pressure to deliver both on the sales side as well as on the buy side on the sales side they are looking to increase market share by bringing innovative products and services to the market much faster to support this speed the buy side needs to develop and manage the right supply chain mix between established and incumbent suppliers new suppliers startups and scale ups overall the business and supplier ecosystems are getting more complicated and need different management due to regulatory requirements and unforeseen factors like this pandemic for instance so if you allow me to start with you tim i would like to ask you what key trends are you seeing in the market as organizations respond to this increasingly challenging environment thank you um this particular piece of research the interviews and surveys we've been undertaking have in fact been tremendously interesting and as you rightly say we are living in disrupted times and of course disruption leads inevitably to much more substantial and potentially much more rapid change than perhaps we've seen i think some of the big things and this will not surprise you is that the pandemic has perhaps been a catalyst to accelerate some of the trends that were already beginning to occur i think speed agility and not new topics this need to get uh innovative products to market faster or innovative services indeed increasingly is again not new but it has become a massive priority as organizations look not only at the importance of revenue margin growth which of course as you likely say affects both buy side and sell side so that means that people i think they're looking at much more attempts to integrate by side and cell side activities they're also wrestling with the fact that the traditional financial models no longer really work and you know as we see cfos needing to engage much more in things like dynamic management of budgets and cash flow through much more we have seen at scenario planning rather than fixed budgets i think it creates not just a pressure but a phenomenal opportunity for procurement groups particularly to escape perhaps the history of focus on savings and much more an opportunity to look at and prioritize outcomes and the pressure on the cell side groups to really think around these issues of where are the friction points what are the things that cause to dislike delay disruption and dispute and how do we get rid of them tim you mentioned agility on the sales side as well as on the buy side agility i think means different things in different contexts can you please elaborate a little bit on what agility means to you well to pick up on your point i guess in in that context they're any contracting commercial process um it is about becoming proactive rather than reactive i think again both of us in our business careers said that we'll be very conscious of the fact that very often contracting groups procurement groups legal groups have a tendency to wait to be told what to do they are often rather transactional in their outlook and that of course has often been driven by the traditional measurement of management systems that they work under and i think agility for me today means these groups have to be at the forefront of understanding and anticipating where the market is going and actually becoming leaders of change rather than perhaps often in the past you know the the delays and the impediments to change happening yes thank you tim paul when we look at morgan stanley based on your experience in the vendor management function which role do you think does organizational agility play in this context yeah so thanks that left and thanks for everyone first of all for allowing me to join today and and be here to talk with all of you uh you know morgan stanley is obviously a very large and international firm but in no way does that mean we're less focused on agility and relatedly resiliency is one of the words we also use as a real buzzword in our firm and in the industry right now and part of that is supporting the business and being able to support services and technology that enable that business we we need to effectively manage change and be able to respond swiftly to those changes whether those are in the business landscape or the regulatory landscape and underlying requirements so for us in the in the vendor contracting space it's one real enabler of firmwide agility and resiliency is an improved contracting process changes in our business often require changes to the contracts whether that's with clients and counterparties or with our suppliers so we are keenly focused on how we can improve the contracting process to support agility across the organization whether that's a lot of the things we'll talk about today but including just being able to you know reduce the time to market for new vendors or changes to vendors and enhance the the vendor relationship process for existing vendors makes perfectly sense thank you paul tim if if we look at this from a contract management perspective is the current state of contracting facilitating or hampering the agility agenda for organizations okay you guys stay there yes i'm sorry oh i think the answer to that's the relatively clear one i think it is the department is hampering that uh that move um in part that because of the transactional nature that we mentioned before very few groups really have consolidated over your role over sight of the contracts and that became extremely evident with the panic that was often created by convict 19 where obviously the importance of delivering management information of supporting better decision making being able to search into contracts to find what key clauses there were um even sort of basic fundamental things like finding the contract portfolio for many was extraordinarily difficult and then of course the pandemic also really brought to the fore the broader fragmentation of data that sits across the organization now that absolutely is not the fault of the contract the clinton or legal community it's the fact that organizations have built application systems typically around functional design rather than integrated process design and contracts and the contracting life cycle is a long one and it's an extended process you know what our research has shown us that that is that on average corporations have different elements of contract data sitting in 24 different systems and by and large those systems don't talk to each other so if you can't get your data then obviously you're really going to struggle to drive agility um 24 different systems and you mentioned 40 different friction points um help us to understand what you mean by friction point and can you give us some examples of key friction points across the contracting life cycle please tim yeah so a fraction point is really uh i suppose the first and foremost point is a friction point is obviously where some delay occurs things get slowed down because there is friction um now i think we do need to be careful with this and make sure that we don't imply that every friction point is bad there are clearly many important phases of an overall contracting process where intervention review thoughtful consideration is a tremendous importance so for example the development of requirements or the analysis of capability uh to meet those requirements would be parallel friction points in a bio and seller organization those of which are a fundamental importance to do well and with a high degree of quality that doesn't alter the fact of course that if we can do it well and with good quality faster that is probably going to be a source competitive advantage and obviously will shorten time to market but of course down at the other end of the scale depth left there are those multitude of friction points that maybe aren't so positive for example if we didn't do that upfront job of requirement definition well there's a high probability we're going to have post-award disagreements and dispute over for example whether or not a change is chargeable or non-chargeable and the more that we can eliminate that type of friction point of course that is a tremendous source of competitive advantage and so just building briefly on that as i mentioned we we do have parallel activities going on i think this is really interesting when you start looking at the what's going on in the buyer organization but then understanding there are similar but different activities going on in the supplier organization and of course the more that we can begin to coordinate across these think through what are the better data flows what are the sort of platforms that we could introduce that could really accelerate the understanding and the uh that evaluation activity and this is just one of the phases of course that we showed on the previous slide you know we have by working together by collaborating more internally and externally with the range of stakeholders phenomenal opportunity to really drive not only as we said faster commerce but actually better commerce yes paul if if we look at these friction points and i assume we talked not about the positive friction points but about negative friction points what have you absorbed observed then in terms of bottlenecks in your contracting process right and we see we frankly see friction points and by bottlenecks throughout the process uh we're always looking to improve on this just thinking and focusing on the authoring and negotiation aspects of the contracting process for example you know we see ad-hoc processes that differ across organizational units or even sometimes person-to-person and that that is differences in process difference in technology is used difference in source and reference materials sometimes and certainly lack of transparency and lack of auditability of the nitty-gritty process of contract negotiation but we do certainly see on the positive side as well just going back to tim's point on the positive friction points you know we're really looking at thinking about ways to exploit a process that would allow us to confirm that a new vendor is needed for example rather than expanding the services that an existing vendor may be able to provide or making clearer service descriptions clear service levels and then certainly using technology and other processes to enhance our deviation analysis to determine whether we're deviating too far from standard provisions that we've found acceptable in the past and then any necessary approvals and escalations based on that um frankly all of these and a lot more than what i've just described can be improved through you know in our view a clear and focused analysis on the process and supported by implementing the right technology to support those process improvements yeah makes perfect sense the better you describe what you really need the better you can then lay out the contracting process rj listen as a leading clm provider and you talked in the beginning a little bit about syria labs but you clearly have helped several organizations to streamline their contracting processes and we have heard from tim and paul but what in your opinion are some of the key areas of friction that you have helped your clients to address and overcome yeah thank you uh that left for that question actually tim and paul have already touched on two of those um tim touched on what i like to call the shoebox problem being able to find all your relevant contract documents in the larger uh electronic graveyards where they tend to be buried these days um then within that shoebox the second level of the same problem is being able to find the right information that's sitting inside those contracts whether it's about expiry or compliance or indeed the expectations that parties have from each other paul touched on another friction point which is the friction that happens during the process of contracting and this is what i call internal friction the internal friction is between that part of the organization that sets the playbook and the approval policies for contracting and that part of the organization whether it's procurement or sales which is actually negotiating the contract and the tension the creative tension here is how do we get the people from procurement or sales uh to comply with the playbook and the approval policies that we have framed at a organizational level and then the third source of friction is more external and that's between counterparties and that is what happens after the contract has been signed how do we get inside and ensure that the expectations that bodies have from each other are baselined in a way that they're expecting the same thing from each other that they're singing from the same sheet of music and that for me i mean whether you call it friction or cognitive dissonance that's a major force of dissatisfaction uh post signatures we'll touch on each of these a little bit later but those are the broad areas thank you rj i understand if tim can we get back to you please and i'm looking back into what you described to us in terms of the process you talked about 24 different systems potentially and um potentially 40 different friction points i guess that many organizations don't even analyze their processes at that granular level and don't have that awareness can you help us to understand why it's so important to identify and manage these friction points effectively and what is the impact if you don't address them yeah i mean we focused uh a lot of course that look at the moment on on the uh the delay impact which of course depending on the nature of the transaction can itself be very significant whether that uh you know particularly if it is for example a procurement activity that is going to enable you to bring a new product to market or um is is perhaps creating a source of of substantial innovation then that is going to have a very real impact on your time to revenue and potentially other financial indicators um so there is certainly that delay component and as you can see the average uh bid to signature for even a simple negotiat agreement where there is any level of negotiation is an average 4.2 weeks well a lot of that negotiation is to be honest probably redundant or unnecessary but even if it is necessary through the sort of techniques that paul was talking about we can have a dramatic impact introduction if we've got things like automated playbooks if we start to introduce self-service you know the leading corporates have got that 4.2 weeks and in fact even a government department that we reviewed recently yes government public sector they're doing this too have got this down to um less than two weeks so that's already a big difference and that's just one simple contract just imagine you should begin to expand that into the complex agreements that as we all know and i'm sure you've experienced in your career too you know we can be talking not just a matter of weeks but months and maybe even years and then of course all of this represents cost because if we're applying people it's costing us money and again those low complexity agreements as soon as even one clause getting negotiated we're looking at around five thousand dollars a time and of course as we go up the scale so that amount of money escalates and this is just for the review and approval process from inception of requirement through to the contract signature and again as we get up to that complex end yes of course it's a much much lower volume of agreements but of course once more we can see costs spiraling into the hundreds of thousands or even the low millions for some of those big complicated outsourcing agreements so if we can begin to tackle all of this not only we dramatically driving down the cost associated with contracting itself but we are also having a very very real impact on other beneficial things like speed to market um and that is of course we're talking just pre-award now as we go on from there of course we have to recognize that all of this flows through into post award so here we've highlighted one of some of the most frequent friction points in the post award environment we've touched on the point that better quality front end activity will in itself begin to have benefit flowing through if we haven't got the data and systems flow that we talked about a lot of these things are quite difficult to observe they happen at an operational level and the organization is just geared up to do them um you know just take one particular example acceptance and acceptance testing you know one of the uh one of our our members in the oil and gas industry has been talking to us about how it was always assumed that acceptance and acceptance testing had to be undertaken on site and the oil and gas sector as we all know is often operating in the most inhospitable and difficult to get to environments so they would often be sending large teams of people out to undertake acceptance testing which meant that they were gone for a number of days and it was extremely expensive to get them there it represented delay it represented resource cost today as a result of the pandemic they're doing it virtually they're doing it online those teams don't need to go anywhere they've found a new way to do it and as you look at all of these i could give you examples case studies every one of them of where organizations are understanding the severity of this particular incident the frequency with which it occurs and they are tackling it and beginning to look how they can apply better intelligence and better technology and better deployment of their people to begin to drive these out of the business yeah and just again quickly and i'm sure paul may have some comments on these two um what's the impact post award well it varies tremendously by the industry and i think we're going to look at some of the reasons for that but of course different industries have different levels of complexity and different scale of reliance upon contracts i mean if you think of the insurance industry for example it's a contracts industry it doesn't really have anything but contracts they are its asset so contract management post award is not surprisingly a very high proportion of operational cost in construction because of the degree of outsourcing that most construction companies operate to it's an even higher percentage because actually arguably just about all of construction management resource is undertaking contract management where they call it project management quantity surveying or whatever at the end of the day there are actually managing contracts yeah thank you tim paul tim talked about um pre-award post award and you touched a little bit on it earlier when you said um you have to make sure that the requirements are all clear in your experience have you observed the impact of pre-award processes on the post award friction absolutely it's the short answer yes right if the if the pre-award process is a black box or you know using aj's examples or you know you execute the agreement and it goes into a shoe box and never to be seen or heard from again uh it real it creates real downstream challenges that cause you know have real dollar and potentially risk impacts you know whether that's on a one-to-one basis meaning our relationship with a particular vendor and having a lack of clarity of the service levels the deliverables and difficulty later to confirm your compliance with our standards but especially on a broader or more macro basis we we believe that we miss out on abilities to gain insights across the vendor landscape so again whether that's one to one to one vendor meaning the ability to review services across the vendor relationship and issues and disputes that are coming up in one part of the business with that vendor that maybe another part of the business would have interest in or want to front run or especially across vendors being able to we see impacts to pricing decisions you know firm wide risk analyses and and much more so having visibility into the contents of those contracts having a clear process and and deliverable process up front very much impacts the the post-award friction post-award processes makes perfect sense so i think we got a picture of friction in in the financial industry um paul talked about the impact on the insurance side and also in the construction industry i wonder whether these friction points affect all organizations at the same way or whether we see differences by industries are there any patterns or even trends recognizable tim and i guess that question should go to you yeah so this says one of the outputs from some of the research work and and indeed you're absolutely right that the uh the answer is it varied tremendously if you look for example at something like the retail sector clearly there are thousands hundreds of thousands of contracts for an organization in retail sector but by and large they're relatively short-term or at least the transactions within them and they are not massively complicated and they are highly automated so we we see a very different pattern there from as you begin to move into organizations that have perhaps much greater variability of types of contract the nature of the transactions they're undertaking um and obviously the underlying complexity of those transactions as you'll see here uh as you begin to move into things like capital projects for example um but uh so engineering construction aerospace defense oil and gas not surprisingly high up there um business this is interesting and of course you know we see a variation of complexity whether you're looking at the buy side of the business or the sell side of the business yes i don't think we have to go through all of them paul maybe we can move on a little bit if you don't mind yes yeah that sorry no that's fine i mean from a from my point of view you know again we see we see friction across these different types of agreements i did want to mention two quick points one is it's been we've been really looking at build and analyzing processes and improving those processes regardless of what the current focus whether that's business focus or regulatory focuses so right now you know it's certainly on cloud data security information privacy and to a large extent subcontracting as well is really the focus but years ago it was something different and for years to come it will be something different again so from a process perspective we're trying to really analyze and build processes that are future proof from a contract provision you know a cause by clause point of view the other thing i wanna we find interesting uh just as a bit of an anecdotal point we're seeing an interesting trend and especially in the technology space uh for a long time a firm like morgan stanley built most of its or a lot of its technology in-house and it was customized or it was purchasing customized software or customized applications for the financial services industry whether those are trading platforms or otherwise and to some extent that's starting to change and that's causing a i think an interesting issue in this space you know whether it's the the rise in sas web-based applications that allow for much greater scalability of a new startup to be able to provide you know the scalability and to a large extent the security and infrastructure that's needed to support a firm like morgan stanley or whether it's our increased use of consumer or retail applications you know that are generally available to the public it's causing real issues in the contracting space or friction in the contracting space because you know you have new companies that are just getting on their feet that feel comfortable selling to a company like morgan stanley but may not be able to either understand or meet all of the requirements that we have the standards that we have especially from a regulated financial services space and then separately on the consumer side we may not be the big player anymore so we may not have the same leverage because that company is servicing literally billions of customers on a one-to-one you know per two-legged person to that company basis they may not be either interested or able to make changes to their applications that are necessary to support a financial services firm that's causing i think it's a real new thing that's emerging and is causing real difficulties yeah clear tim maybe can can you highlight one or two contract types and issues which create the greatest friction and we have to speed up a little i guess because we're slightly behind time indeed so well as we say here of course most polar post award issues are corrosive in the value for one of the parties and um the contract on the left-hand side the research told us that out of the 50 or 60 different types of contract that we actually analyzed these are the top eight in terms of the types of agreement where there is the greatest friction and of course this is the sort of data that we are looking and building as uh mentioned at the beginning into this sort of friction index capability where organizations can begin to come up with a better assessment of the opportunity and indeed their positioning i suppose in the market currently so um you know we've got here the pre-award friction points some of which are absolutely beneficial and we've got the post award which by and large are not and what we are doing is of course mapping those back to the different types of contract to see how well we're doing in streamlining the upfront ones that are valuable and eliminating the backend ones that really are best avoided yes let's throw a little automation into the equation and let's talk about whether the impact of these friction points is in any kind any way linked to the level of automation we have in the contracting processes yeah so this was uh analysis we undertook by industry looking at the different uh functionalities that people could have within uh their sort of automated contract management systems and you'll see here the tremendous variability but you'll also see that even those companies that have made a start on contract life cycle management systems uh have often been very um constrained in their implementation uh so the the heavy highly heavily heavily highlighted line of the repository is about the only place where there is significant presence and the point here is that often that is still not enterprise-wide which is why even organizations that had invested in repositories were not necessarily that well equipped to do the search as they needed but you know as you look at much of the other functionality well in most industries it's it's either missing or a very small minority who really have built this potential competitive advantage yeah thank you very much rj since syrian labs domain is automation as part of contract lifecycle management what is your take on this yeah deadlift what we're seeing is that there are wide variations on uh automation uh industry by uh industry so just looking for example at this slide uh and looking a little bit closer let's say at the healthcare and the pharma sectors we tend to see a fairly low level of technology maturity uh on the signature uh monitoring of contractual terms uh we can see that number is uh fairly low and the same applies to integrations with other key systems or the interoperability with other business transaction systems whether it's your ariba or your arp or even your crm systems and uh putting those two together what it translates to is more friction for healthcare and pharma organizations on the post signature phase meaning after the contract uh has been signed and therefore what we are seeing uh is that a lot of our work with pharma customers has focused on streamlining their post-signature supplier monitoring and management and performance uh tracking as a result of that when you look at sectors like banking and financial services for example the focus is exactly the opposite because their maturity levels on the pre-signature side tend to be low specifically when it comes to contract authoring and negotiation and what that's telling us is that they have a high level of processed maturity um in terms of articulating their contract approvals and even their playbooks but the level of compliance or adherence uh to those policies tends to be low and this represents then a big focus for us uh in working with bfsi organizations so i hope to get that gives you some favor of the relationship uh between automation and friction points and what we're seeing broadly is an inverse correlation yes clear um now that we understand the problem stem maybe you can give us a quick um touch on what companies can do to solve um those issues with friction points please yeah so certainly digitization is on many lips and organizations without question are accelerating their digitization initiatives but this is also of course about people it's about uh not only analysis by people of where digitization can benefit from what form it could take but then also what is the new relationship between people and machines that comes from that digitization in order to make real progress certainly if you begin to hone in and understand where the major friction points are and begin to concentrate your efforts there that's how you can get the fastest bang for the buck and probably elicit the greatest management support so undertaking the analysis then obviously working through the implementation of the tools and systems and importantly they're not stepping away you know the real point is we then have to monitor the effectiveness what is the performance and what are the continuing opportunities for continuous improvement yeah super that's exactly what rj said hey paul in your experience um what are your approaches what tools did you use what technologies do you apply to work effectively in overcoming friction points in the contracting life cycle please yeah so we're in especially in the vendor space still getting started in this space but the things i want to mention three main things that we're focused on the one is as was just mentioned right understanding the process and then where possible standardizing that process and automating it if that's available impossible the next is really forming a contracting process that's connected both upstream and downstream to other information systems and processes so that you know you're using golden source information whether that's upstream golden source feeding into the contracting process or the contract itself in the negotiated positions within it feeding a downstream process rather than manual re-keying or other or other things like that then the third which is really important to me is for meeting people where they work and live today uh you know for example just one easy example right lawyers live and work in outlook and word that's just the way it is and trying to change that will only cause us problems so we were literally looking for technology solutions that integrated and incorporated that reality into the solution itself which we believe will drive user adoption and is the key to everything else clear thank you very much paul tim we talked about automation and the relationship to friction points can you touch a little bit on artificial intelligence and on machine learning and what role those two play in automation please yeah so this was a big piece of the study and we will in in partnership with syrian perhaps be issuing a report on on very much what we found in terms of the state of play on machine learning and uh you know the the picture as you might expect is a pretty mixed one um and it may be useful in fact if we move to the next slide to start picking up on these three different tiers of what we discovered you know i think uh the uh efficiency drivers um these are often done more at a functional level paul it may not come as any surprise to you very often we found uh legal departments for example much more focused on these aspects of efficiency uh you've touched on a number of these i think you know the automation of redlining terms of uh you know automated playbooks so there are some basic functionalities that we saw um but then also some much more advanced ones particularly as we start getting i think into more automated risk scoring and reporting really driving some fantastic management reporting to help business decision-making around where we maybe want to invest or disinvest even and these efficiency benefits tend to be focused much more in the pre-award phase again understandable that legal departments are more focused there because that's usually where their remit is yeah but then we uh we discovered others who were looking more at transactional effectiveness so these groups are looking uh beyond simple efficiencies which obviously bring benefit but it is a constrained benefit yes i can maybe certainly you know we touched on reduction of cycle time we touched on bringing down the cost of contract review etc that's valuable but it isn't going to be transformational um where effectiveness comes in can bring a lot more money that's through things like these obligation extraction or in the advanced context much more proactive obligation management we're looking there too at things like organizations beginning to think about advanced algorithms that give predictive warnings of risk contracts so don't wait for it to be in trouble let's get the alert let's understand the characteristics of at-risk agreements and actively monitor monitor those contracts that we care about to become much better at avoiding the value of erosion can occur but here auditorium yes go ahead sorry here again the the issue very often is that it's being looked at at a transactional level which does bring real benefit but isn't if we go to our third category um if you like uh you know a game changer so from here we we begin to look at the third group which is much more about transformational change and that's driven through greater commercial intelligence and here's where organizations are really beginning to look at portfolio management doing much better segmentation of their contract and relationship types to understand the levels and degree of self-service they can bring in to undertake much more data mining so they begin to see customer preferences they look at past performance indicators and really start to drive towards data modeling and value optimization initiatives and i think as i mentioned before interestingly more focus on this from the interviews and research more focus on this actually today on the sell side than there is on the buy side i think back to your opening comments that look the importance of growth of margin improvement of revenue of new streams of revenue is really driving this pressure initially into sales contracting yes yes clear thank you very much listen rj i i would have loved to hear what's happening at morgan stanley but i think we're running a little bit out of time obviously um artificial intelligence does play a major role and if i look into contract life cycle management do you think that ai powered clms do play a role in helping organizations to address those friction points eliminate them and get better in the management of their contracting lifecycles absolutely uh tim i mean let me try and explain with the help of a few slides how these advancements in technology are already playing a role in addressing the friction points the i'll give four or five examples very quickly the one in front of you is the base level of machine learning and ai on the left hand side you can see an executed contract in a pdf format and the gray highlighted segment of that has been detected by the uh ai and you can see how the structured data and the summary of that has been captured on the right hand side of the page so this is an example of ai powered car metadata extraction from the executed contract the second example in front of you is and that's shining a light if you went on the past the example in front of you right now is shining a light on the present it's helping you to negotiate life and here you can see that based on the inputs that we have given to the system it is helping us to select from a centralized library of standard clauses and correlating our current circumstances to the corporate playbook and you know whether it should be a fallback position or a preferred position that should be used in this particular context so it's guiding us in drafting a contract on the fly the third example on the subsequent slide uh shows how it's helping us to negotiate a counterparty draft so the counterparty draft has come in that is now on the left hand side of the screen and on the right hand side the system has automatically tagged that and it has correlated that to our existing playbook positions and is identifying the potential risk embodied in the count parties uh paper and it still making suggestions to us on how to negotiate and redline that incoming third party draft the subsequent so that's not helping us navigate the present if we go to the subsequent slide uh again this continues and this is now coming into the element of collaboration paul had mentioned uh that as well this is now allowing multiple users to work together in tandem uh and edit different parts of the contract based on their levels of access and expertise this has been a very thorny problem in the past because only one person can work on a document at one time and with this technology now multiple users depending on their expertise and access can work together in a collaborative fashion on the next slide we can see how the technology if we move forward how the technology is now helping us by identifying and highlighting risks across the legacy contracts that are comprising our portfolio showing us what different types of contracts we have this is that shoebox if you will it's shining a light and that should be telling us what composition is by agreement how many of our agreements have audit rights or data protection provisions uh what laws are governing them which provisions that we like to see are missing from our standard contracts and so on and this is in one click giving us invisibility into what lies inside that shoebox and finally in the last slide this is how uh you know when buyers and suppliers the counterparties start to collaborate actively uh they can start seeing the results of their adherence to the contractual promises in real time uh by interoperating with other transaction systems that falls as paul had mentioned uh they can now start getting a dynamic picture into performance and even into validating their invoices as per the contract so a long distance from storing a contract in a repository that left in a nutshell yes thank you very much rj i think it became pretty clear that it's very important to understand where are our friction points it's very important to address these friction points in order to have an impact on agility in both value chains on the procurement side and the customer facing side and i know that world cc tim and sierra labs you guys are working on some important initiatives in this area and rj maybe we can use the last minutes to share some information and details on those initiatives if you don't mind yeah happy too happy to do that obviously this is an emerging field and there isn't enough awareness and a general lack of resources for organizations and that's why world cc and cereal labs have been working on a detailed study of this topic of friction in contracting at the end of the study we will be publishing a very detailed report that will provide information on friction points on key macro trends and the suggested approaches for addressing those friction points broken down by industry we're planning to release this report in the coming weeks and one of the most important outcomes of the study will be the friction index which we believe is a first of its kind benchmarking index for organizations to assess their friction score against their peer industry benchmarks i will request tim to share some more information on the research outcomes so far as well as on the friction index itself over do you think yeah thank you so i think well as we've indicated hopefully through this webinar um ai machine learning are definitely no longer something for the future this is becoming something of an urgent priority for many of our member organizations and that we need to think about the roi from contract automation and digitization no longer think of it as a cost reduction mechanism in the traditional way of many software and technology investments but this is absolutely about value improvement and that where we need to be focusing our thinking and our analysis and i think we're we're seeing tremendous growth of receptivity on the part of cfos in that understanding really building from the experience of covet um there are and without doubt some challenges we've talked already about the fact that many either don't really have a repository or it's incomplete or not easily searchable and if you can't really build your metadata and your taxonomy then your project is going to be more challenging but it doesn't mean you can't or shouldn't do it the linkage of those multiple data pools starting to sink around technology platforms that can actually link data is of critical importance here stopping thinking perhaps so much of contract management technologies as yet another functional application and recognizing that it truly is a business-wide application that needs to offer a platform for the integrity and integration of data and finally just reinforcing the point i think it's proving not only more pressing but also in fact in some ways easier for cell side than by side because they don't tend to have the history of heritage systems buy side is obviously built in a lot of technology particularly support things like procure to pay which is not helping them in this environment but unfortunately they've got that investment there and they're having to think about how they build from it so some exciting stuff going on and really pushing i think the commercial and contracting organizations to the forefront really to the point that that of you and i discussed of this is an opportunity for us to step out of the shadows and into the limelight so what are we doing in terms of the friction index well very briefly there yes as it has said we're working together to take all of this data and many other data points that we have to really try and create the an index that as it says it's going to take account of the organization's industry the typical sort of contract mix that it has that will enable organizations to input data to the index to establish really what their potential return is um but also where they sit in relative terms compared with others in their industry as uh paul that both of you know our ability to be able to position to top management where we sit um relative to others is always one of the most compelling messages of all yeah yes thank you very much tim and paul rj i think i hand now back to you okay i i think we have a couple of minutes left so i'll invite my colleague dj uh to read out uh questions if any uh that have come in thank you we do have a few questions and we have a couple of minutes so the first one is for tim tim does the research show many organizations are actively assessing their fiction points and acting on this information um i would say at this stage the answer is uh it would not be a majority for many of the reasons we touched on but there are definitely a number of uh market leaders who really are focused strongly on this and see it as absolutely a route to uh their growing competitiveness uh and their ability to really differentiate themselves in the market thanks tim uh and maybe one more for paul we can squeeze in paul for regulated industries such as financial services are there specific aspects of the regulatory compliance landscape that cause or impact friction in the contracting process yeah thanks dj there certainly are uh and you know as a again a highly regulated industry i imagine it's similar for like health care for example and others um you know there are specific we have regulatory requirements that have even specific contractual clauses that need to be included and that actually is easier than other places to negotiate because you can point the vendor to you know an outside regulatory requirement or other places where we've developed an internal process to deal with regulatory obligations and that flows through to a contractual provision which is different for financial services and this goes back to the point that i had made earlier that more and more we are dealing with vendors who support not just financial services but and not just regulated industries but the public at large and so they're really seeing different diligence processes different contracting language coming across from us as compared to a lot of their other customers thank you paul uh and we are out of time so thank you panelists and thank you everyone in the audience for joining us today and at the end of this webinar you will see a brief survey please do complete that to give us your feedback and we'll be sending out uh follow-up emails with a copy of the slides and the recording and we invite you to join us for future events uh thank you thank you very much and have a great day ahead you