Healthcare Leader Lumeris Accelerated Contract Cycles by 5X on ServiceNow

About Company

Lumeris is a managed services operator specializing in value-based care in the healthcare industry. It is one of the pioneering frontline organizations supporting the paradigm shift from a volume-based 'pay' driven system to a value-based ' reward' driven system.

Lumeris plays a significant role in helping health systems and providers achieve better clinical and financial outcomes by promoting high-quality, cost-effective care that satisfies consumers and engages physicians. It is noteworthy that Lumeris predominantly has buy-side contracts for the procurement of services.

Key Customer Challenges

Limited Visibility into Legal Processes

The existing Lumeris contract process needed to be more mature and manual, which led to several challenges for its legal team. The team responsible for crafting confidential contracts and reviewing third-party contracts grappled with a need for more transparency in its workflow. Besides, the high dependency on legal to draft contracts and the need for more insights led to a substantial strain on the legal team. This resulted in delays owing to their heavy workload and a restricted understanding of the broader operational landscape.

Risk of Misunderstandings and Disputes

Lumeris was deeply concerned that contract misunderstandings and misinterpretations could lead to legal disputes and significant financial losses for the company. For example, a poorly defined payment terms clause could result in delayed payments or financial penalties.

Vendor Onboarding Challenges

Lumeris was lacking a true 360°-degree view of their suppliers, services available, and supplier performance. They faced critical challenges in getting vendor details reviewed by their Vendor Management and FP&A Teams when requesting a new contract with a New Vendor. Delays and inefficiencies in the vendor onboarding process impacted the company's ability to initiate new contracts and partnerships.

Lumeris was exploring a centralized solution to streamline the vendor onboarding and contracting process and mitigate these challenges.

Approach

Lumeris works with large healthcare players and reputed institutions, developing healthcare innovations and focusing on processing third-party contracts. Aavenir's Contract Lifecycle Management solution was a perfect fit to overcome Lumeris' challenges, so Lumeris adopted Aavenir's Contractflow to enhance its contract management process.

Aavenir Solution

  1. Self-Author Contract by Legal Team

Besides managing vendor contracts, Lumeris' legal team can now create contracts (Business Associate Agreements, Independent Contractors, MSA being the most common contract types) while maintaining confidentiality with restricted access to specific users.

  1. Timely Auto-Renewal of Contracts

With Aavenir Contractflow, the legal team can rely on the system to automatically renew contracts based on predefined terms, eliminating the need for manual intervention. This ensures that contracts are renewed promptly, significantly reducing the risk of missed renewals.

  1. Automated Alerts and Real-time Updates

The solution provides automated alerts for missing information (30-60-90 days reminders for renewals and signatures), minimizes the risk of expensive errors and potential legal conflicts. Real-time alerts allow Lumeris to identify bottlenecks in the contract management process and take corrective actions promptly.

  1. Vendor Soft-Onboarding

Aavenir Contractflow and the Request-to-Contract Management process enabled Lumeris to conduct soft onboarding for vendors while maintaining the essential review process. Lumeris can submit contract requests, review counterparty information electronically, and maintain audit trails.

Once the process is complete, Aavenir Contractflow updates vendor details in the ServiceNow Vendor Master (a core component of Lumeris' system), simplifying vendor management and improving overall efficiency.

peter
"The Aavenir team has taken the time to understand Lumeris’ particular needs, and has put in exceptional effort to ensure that, as implemented, Aavenir Contractflow generates efficiencies in our complex workflow."
-Peter Rasche
Associate General Counsel, Lumeris

Results and Outcome

A Leading Telecommunications Company Enabled Self-service Contract Creation using Connected Contract Request Module on ServiceNow

About Company

A leading provider of satellite communications and IT services - delivering critical communications services, based in Texas, serves more than 3,200 customers in over 140 countries across diverse verticals including, Mining, Maritime, Energy,  Media, Telecom, Cruise, NGO, Government, and Enterprise sectors. Known for its passionate customer focus and strong safety culture, the world’s most comprehensive network helps enable faster and seamless pole-to-pole coverage from a global hybrid satellite, besides microwave, cellular, fiber, MPLS, and IP transport network with direct access to public cloud platforms.

Client’s Contract Management Challenges

Despite having a CLM solution, the team was facing operational challenges in managing the contacts across the organization. The contracting processes were manual and inefficient with limited visibility into the specifics. There was no involvement of legal in the contract creation cycle. 

Non-user-friendly CLM system with no user adoption across teams

The global communications partner used Traditional CLM software to manage its contract lifecycle, but the user adoption across teams was zilch. To a large extent, the processes were manual as well as non-standardized Sales, Finance, HR, and IT teams (internal customers) used to reach out to their Legal team for their contractual needs. Most workflows were manual, from contract request submission to contract review and negotiation. The legal team reached out (to the internal customer/s) via email or phone call to understand the need or to gather additional information required to fulfill the requirement. 

And when it came to the adoption experience, it  was not cutting across the different functional areas. So it was one of the prime reasons they decided  not to renew the extension for the legacy Contract Management Software. 

Legal team bottlenecks

Since the organization is vast and most teams work in silos, the entire contracting process has been marred by inefficiencies, especially between sales and legal teams. The sales team usually created contracts in their MS-CRM dynamics, and then they were sent to the legal team for further proceedings. However, due to a lack of visibility and transparency, the legal team was hardly getting adequate review time. 

Moreover, the legal team had to adhere to very short notices to check the contract's compliance parameters and other crucial areas. 

Inability to locate and trace contracts

The user adoption of CLM was inadequate, and most processes were manual. Hence, despite having a contract repository, not all contracts were uploaded to it. As a result, some contracts were even distorted beyond their existing CLM software as well. This situation was repeatedly resulting in errors and challenges for everyone involved. 

Scattered contracts and siloed operations were a major headache for the legal team, which pursued them to initiate the requirement for a smart CLM system. 

The Solution - Aavenir Contract Lifecycle Management Solution for Telecommunications Industry

The prior bad experience with their CLM system made their CLM evaluation process extremely cautious and precise. After a careful evaluation of features, functionalities, and ease of use, they zeroed down its choice on Contractflow. Th e global communications partner partnered with Aavenir to rethink the approach to end-to-end management of their complex contract processing from MS CRM for creating contract requests to DocuSign for Signatures. 

They implemented Aavenir Contractflow on ServiceNow for different teams involved, It will primarily cater to the legal in Sell-Side & Buy-Side Contract for those based in the United States & Australia helping them digitize all of their paper contracts using Aavenir word-add in plug in and allowing them to access all its contracts in single contract repository.

Legacy Contract Migration

Voluminous legacy contracts were successfully imported from their existing CLM software and stored in the Aavenir Contract repository. Successful migration of their siloed contracts without any data loss, with the help of third-party,  not only improved overall visibility, but also enabled the reduction in time spent searching for them. 

Out-of-the-box and Lean Contract Request Module

The contract request module has been customized and rebuilt to accommodate the requirements. Internal customers (requestor) can create a contract request (intake form) either via MS CRM, based on email (MS-outlook), or directly in Contractflow.  Instead of primary 5 fields, this revamped version offers 75 fields to ease the contract management process. 

With Aavenir contract request templates, users can now create contract requests directly from their Outlook, without login into Aavenir Contractflow, which gets assigned to the Contract Manager who is mentioned in the email. 

Similarly, the Sales team or Requestor can initiate a request through MS-CRM and it lands in the Aavenir Request module. The entire process is so lean and simplified that the journey from contract request to legal contract creation happens in a few clicks. 

Seamless Collaboration

They have implemented a variety of major contract types. Regardless of the contract type and the channel from which a contract request has been submitted, the entire system and collaboration workflows are seamless. Besides, the internal linking - ticket-to-contract is a seamless journey even for non-legal users as they don't need to login to the CLM solution now and then. In fact, they get status updates from their MS Outlook. In all, Aavenir's solution successfully optimized their contracting process. 

Faster Turnaround / Accelerated Contract Lifecycle

As soon as the contract request is sent, based on the contact request ID, the agreement is created in Contractflow. Everything is impromptu and dynamic - no backlogs in the entire process anywhere. 

Furthermore, the collaborative and cohesive implementation of the inbuilt chat module bridges the communication and collaboration gaps among contract requesters, contract managers, and other teams. 

This LIVE chat mechanism helps get most of the things resolved on time and, as a result, accelerates the entire lifecycle of contract management. 

The Multi-global Users

The global communications partner team comprises a global team and the Aavenir Contractflow application is used and implemented across 4 continents. The sales department is spread across Europe and Africa, the legal department sits in Australia, and the other teams, including Sales, Legal, and HR, are spread across North America and Malaysia.

Contract Management Dashboards

Aavenir Contractflow dashboards give deeper insight into contract status, enhance visibility and reduce risks. Their leadership team, spread across the globe, can visualize all the needed metrics, KPIs, and metadata, harnessing the power of AI-powered contract analytics in real-time with visual dashboards. 

“The ability to create a contract request from an outlook is a wow factor. We use ready-made Aavenir templates for request submissions and contracts seamlessly get created in Aavenir CLM.”

-   Manager, Commercial Contracts

Key Results

In just 1-month post soft launch of Contractflow 3.0, the latest NOW version - San Diego, they were able to successfully migrate legacy contracts and streamline contract lifecycle management by implementing Aavenir Contractflow on the Now Platform.