Polariseme, a leading business process management (BPM) consultancy, today announced that Abdul Latif Jameel (ALJ) has launched a comprehensive Legal Contract Review solution to replace the manual approach for reviewing and approving legal contracts. Abdul Latif Jameel (ALJ) is comprised of diversified businesses with deep roots in the Middle East, North Africa, and Turkey (MENAT region). Over the years, ALJ has established an extensive operation infrastructure, built the largest vehicle distribution network in Saudi Arabia, and accumulated comprehensive automotive expertise throughout the region.
Challenge:
ALJ had been manually managing the review and approval of legal contracts such as NDAs, transportation contracts, MOUs, service level agreements, and supply or general purchasing agreements. This approach had resulted in many challenges including:
- Time-consuming review and approval process of legal contracts by ALJ’s legal and finance teams thereby cutting into their valuable time.
- Lack of visibility into current approval status and approval audit of a legal contract for those involved in the review.
- Absence of a unified view to search reviewed legal contract records since all document versions were scattered across hard drives, emails, and filing cabinets.
- Non-standardized vendor communication due to varying email responses and legal contract formats sent to vendors from ALJ’s different departments.
- Manual tracking of legal contract expiry that made it cumbersome to manage renewals of soon-to-expire contracts.
Solution:
PolariseMe had an existing and comprehensive Legal Contract Review solution available on the Appian App Market. After initial review of this solution, ALJ determined that the solution addressed more than 90% of their requirements for managing legal contracts. Since this solution was built on Appian’s powerful low-code platform, the solution was further configured within a short span of two weeks as per ALJ’s requirements.
This solution addressed ALJ’s challenges in managing legal contracts as follows:
- Automated the entire process of submission, review, and approval of legal contracts for ALJ’s legal and finance team. Solution also provided the flexibility for ad-hoc exceptional approvals and additional recipient input for certain contract clauses, if necessary.
- Made available a unified and organized collection of all legal contract review cases as records. These contract review case records were searchable and filterable based on criteria such as contract value, reference number, and vendor name. Additionally, legal contract and supporting document versions could be managed from the record.
- Gave visibility to all involved on the current status of the legal contract review cycle using graphical milestone view and automated news updates. A complete approval audit for the legal contract was also made available on the record.
- Standardized communication with vendors by automating email communication using uniform email content and consistent document format for approved contracts.
- Enabled more effective management of expiring contracts by providing automatic email reminders before contract expiry dates, and automating the contract renewal process once initiated.
Benefits:
The Legal Contract Review solution provided ALJ a standardized yet flexible case-based approach to manage the review and approval process of legal contracts. This solution automated many of the menial tasks involved in the review and approval process such as routing of tasks, conversion of approved documents to appropriate formats, emailing of approved contract version to vendors, maintaining audit details, and managing the automated reminders for renewal of contracts. This automation resulted in tremendous time saving for ALJ’s high cost resources including legal and finance team members involved in the review. Tracking of legal contract cases became much easier with a unified and organized view. All pertinent information and audit details of a legal case review such as versions of legal contract created during the approval were easily accessible from the legal case review record. Furthermore, the solution could be continuously enhanced to meet the demands of an evolving regulatory environment and changing business landscape since it was built on Appian’s powerful platform that tightly integrates business process management, data management and more.
Customer Quote:
“Appian helped us to organize our task doing contract review with the business, we used to review our contracts manually and now we have Appian in our plate we are now more organized we can easy track the contract and automated to the next concerned department. We work in a single platform and everyone will be updated on its progress. Hassle free and tension free as the system will auto escalate our request as per defined SLA.”