About Company

Founded in 1983, Express Employment Professionals serves customers globally through a network of more than 850 franchise locations worldwide. 

Express used Symfact as their primary contract management solution to manage all the service agreements, vendor, franchise, and employee agreements. With an increasing number of contracts and limited functionality in Symfact, contract managers at Express wanted to achieve a single source of truth for all their service agreements and contracts, and also simplify the contract authoring and storage. 

Moreover, Symfact is an OnPrem contract solution making it challenging to work across borders, and needed a cloud-based contract management solution. Also, the contract managers wanted to implement role-based contract access with streamlined contract audits that comply with their monthly, quarterly compliance schedules. 

Key Contract Management Challenges

We work with 800+ vendors and recruitment partners, making it challenging to get visibility for contracts created, canceled, processed, and signed. We are looking to adopt AI and get contract visibility across all the agreements which lacked in the on-premises contract management solution. Another challenge for Aavenir’s team was to abstract and migrate all the legacy contracts to the ServiceNow platform shared with the customer.

The key challenges include:

• Extended contract review cycles 
• Preliminary implementation with the earlier vendor with limited functionality
• Lack of contract reporting
• No direct visibility in contract status

"Not all contracts are the same, and automating the contracting process with AI-based workflows helped us streamline the review process for all categories of contracts. Aavenir Contractflow added verifiable value to our processes with a unified contract repository, automated notifications, and dedicated contract management dashboards to manage contracts for our International Headquarters and for 800+ franchise offices worldwide.

Not to mention the flexibility for customizations, priority training, and support received by team Aavenir was phenomenal.”

-Jared Mashaney
Sr. Counsel | Director of Contracts and Franchising, Express Employment Professionals

The Solution: Aavenir Contract Lifecycle Management Solution for Professional Services

Express’ service agreements are managed in Symfact, and all the data needed to be migrated to the ServiceNow platform as it offers more flexibility. Aavenir Contractflow is an AI-enabled cloud-based contract management solution built natively on the ServiceNow platform delivering Microsoft Word enabled contract authoring, secure storage, and advanced contract reports with contract audit dashboards. Additionally, they wanted to simplify the contract workflow process, keeping the entire contracting process streamlined in a single system. Moreover, contract redlining and editing contract agreements were easy with Aavenir Word add-in.

AI-enabled Contract Authoring + Centralization 

Express can create multiple service agreements and consolidate all contracts in a centralized repository on Now Platform with enhanced contract search functionality. AI helped to create contracts directly from emails and other digital documents, simplifying the contract authoring cycle. 

Cancel Contracts with Flexible Workflows

Some of the service agreements were required to be canceled in real-time which was achieved with Aavenir Contractflow. Also, the solution offered custom contract processing workflows based on the vendor type. The signing of contracts was implemented to capture both wet and e-signatures.

Renaming Contracts with Drag n Drop Contract Creation from Attachment

Express’ contract management team needed to create agreements on the fly, so a custom implementation was enabled in Aavenir Contractflow where users can create agreements by simply drag-n-drop of email attachments and the AI would create contracts on the fly. This shortens the contract creation time and proper contract version controls were maintained in the centralized contract management system. Renaming contract agreements were also implemented in the Aavenir Contractflow solution to maximize efficiency and reduce contract creation time.

Contract Reports & Dashboards 

Aavenir Contractflow offered custom contract dashboards providing contract visibility for key metrics like contract by month, contract cycle time report for individual contract types, contract due to renewal, upcoming renewals, total spend by vendor, total spend by status, and more. 

Key Results

Express Professionals and Aavenir teams went through a series of sessions for successful implementation and adoption. And, it wasn’t long before they saw the benefits of using Aavenir Contractflow.

• Centralized contract repository
• Unified contract workflow
• Real-time visibility in contract status