About the Customer
The customer, a leading Fortune 500 insurance provider in North America, with over a century of experience delivering premium insurance products and services, sought to optimize its Source-to-Contract (S2C) processes. To streamline operations, the company implemented Aavenir’s RFPflow and Aavenir Contractflow solutions. These tools now manage their end-to-end buy-side contract and procurement workflows efficiently.
Key Customer Challenges
- Multiple Sourcing and Contracting Requests: The customer faced the challenge of managing Contracts and Sourcing requests from their 8,000+ users. Hence, there was a need for a one-stop sourcing and contract request intake tool that is simple, user-friendly and has an intuitive UI. It was essential to ensure that all the requesters could quickly raise either a sourcing or contract request, which could then be flipped into an actual contract or RFX.
- Excessive Manual Work to Execute Source-to-Contract Cycle: The customer's existing process involved excessive manual and redundant work (such as the absence of a defined approval process), which led to lower productivity and outcomes across the sourcing and contract lifecycles.
- Lack of Adoption Due to Clunky UI: The customer's existing solution lacked an intuitive UI, making it difficult for the customer to manage contract requests and approvals and create contracts and RFPs. The customer needed a lean, persona-specific UI that enabled users to minimize risk and perform their tasks efficiently and accurately.
- High Operational Inefficiencies: The customer faced increased operational inefficiencies due to delayed error detection, lack of real-time validation against data entries, conflicting policies, etc. They were looking for a robust and stable system that would deliver an efficient process that would reduce manual corrections, improve productivity, and help detect missed opportunities for timely decision-making.
- Lack of integration with Third-Party Tools: To further streamline their processes, the customer needed to build a deeper integration with third-party tools such as Archer (for risk management) and Oracle to get the information validated and reflected automatically. This lack of integration led to data silos and inefficient workflows, requiring manual data entry and increased risk of errors.
- Lack of Visibility of Sourcing and Contract Status: The customer faced limited visibility into their sourcing and contract status, increasing risks and potential non-compliance as teams struggled to track progress or resolve issues promptly. This lack of transparency hindered decision-making, causing inefficiencies and higher costs due to delays in procurement and contract execution.
- Complex Review and Approval process: The customer had a complex review and approval process involving multiple groups/teams (legal, risk, privacy, and security). It led to misalignment, inefficiencies, and difficulty in tracking the status of approvals, which eventually slowed overall decision-making and hampered operational agility.
Approach and Solution
The customer was looking for an all-encompassing, user-friendly tool that would allow its users to raise requests for contracts or RFXs and enable faster approvals from various governance, finance, and legal groups. Besides providing visibility on the status of all these requests at the same time, the customer implemented Aavenir Contractflow for contract management and Aavenir RFPflow solution for Sourcing Management, which provided them with a tailored UI to streamline their end-to-end Source-to-Contract (S2C) process.
- User-Friendly and Intuitive Request Module: To simplify the process of requesting contracts and RFXs, Aavenir designed a custom, lean UI tailored to the needs of the customer's user base. The intuitive interface allows requesters to seamlessly input required information based on the type of request, ensuring efficiency and ease of use. With pre-loaded contract types and templates, users can quickly log their requests, reducing complexity and accelerating the submission process.
- Single integrated tool for Contracts, RFXs, Vendor onboarding and Risk scoring: The Aavenir solution was designed to streamline the customer's sourcing and contract requests through a unified intake process, enabling them to initiate RFx and contracts seamlessly. Additionally, integration with Oracle provided a single source of truth for key data like cost centers, vendor information, and user lists, eliminating the need for manual data entry and improving accuracy across the system. Similarly, Archer integration allowed for risk status to be reflected on Aavenir.
- Flexible Contract Approval and Review Workflows: The system automatically triggers approval workflows based on the contract type and associated input data, significantly reducing manual intervention and minimizing errors. Additionally, it allows designated user groups to initiate ad-hoc approvals as needed, ensuring users have complete control over workflow customization and adaptability to unique business requirements.
- Improved Contract Status Visibility: Aavenir's contract status and sub-status view deliver real-time insights into each contract's current stage, indicating whether it is pending approval or approved by specific groups and outlining the next steps. Moreover, the contract status can also be viewed at the request level, which allows all requestors to get real-time information without going inside the contract.
- Persona-based Actionable Dashboards/Reports: Aavenir solution provides the customer with tailored insights for different user roles within sourcing and contract management, ensuring that each stakeholder can access the most relevant data for their needs. Users gain access to key metrics such as the monthly number of requests or contracts created, top contributors in request and contract creation, and cycle times based on their specific personas.
- Integration with Third-Party Tools:
- Oracle Integration: The customer leverages seamless integration with Oracle to onboard new suppliers and conduct due diligence - adding value to the existing workflows. This integration streamlines the process of onboarding and deactivating vendors in the system. Additionally, Aavenir retrieves master data from Oracle, including key information such as the Cost Center.
- Archer Integration: When approval is required from Third-Party Risk Management (TPRM), information from the contract and counterparty is automatically sent to Archer. Authorized stakeholders can approve the request directly in Archer, and feedback is sent back to Aavenir.
Results and Outcomes
- Enhanced Efficiency with Intuitive Request Module: The custom, lean UI designed by Aavenir streamlines the process of requesting contracts and RFXs, making it user-friendly and efficient for customers. By enabling requesters to input required information easily and providing pre-loaded contract types and templates, the solution significantly reduces complexity and enhances the overall user experience. This led to a 20 percent improvement in the Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT).
- Faster Decision-Making with Persona-Based Insights: Users can make more informed decisions, enhance collaboration, and improve efficiency across the contract lifecycle by providing tailored metrics- such as monthly requests, top contributors, and cycle times. This role-specific or persona-based data empowers each team member to focus on key performance indicators that matter most to their responsibilities, driving better overall outcomes.
- Reduced Bottleneck due to Flexible Contract Approval: Flexible contract approval and review workflows enable different teams or stakeholders across the customer's organization to be involved at the right stages, ensuring thorough review while maintaining efficiency. Automating this process helped streamline approvals and ensured clear audit trails, improving transparency and compliance across all stakeholders.
- Greater Control and Transparency: Customers have hugely benefitted from the solution as they can easily track the progress of contracts at every stage, ensuring greater control throughout the contract lifecycle. This transparency helps teams stay aligned, reduces bottlenecks, improves overall contract management productivity, and minimizes the risk of non-compliance and missed deadlines.
- Enhanced Collaboration by Providing Real-Time Access: Integrating with third-party tools allows enhanced collaboration by providing real-time access to critical information across departments, ensuring that all teams are aligned. Additionally, integration helps automate workflows, speeding up processes and boosting efficiency within existing systems.
