Author: Onit

Onit Recognized as a Finalist in American Marketing Association (AMA) Crystal Awards Competition

Posted on May 2, 2018 by - Company News and Events

Onit is excited to announce that we are an AMA Houston Crystal Award finalist in the website category! Each spring, AMA Houston hands out Crystal Awards to the Texas’ top marketers in categories ranging from print and radio spots to website design, social media advertising and everything in between. The awards gala is the largest marketing event in Houston and is attended by more than 650 marketing professionals from almost every industry in Houston.

The Crystal Awards committee sets criteria, tabulates results, and certifies finalists and winners. A select panel of esteemed marketing professionals from across the country acts as judges. Past participants have been senior marketers from other AMA chapters, Ogilvy & Mather, FedEx, Accenture, University of Michigan, and more. All entries are judged at least twice. Judges make all decisions regarding eligibility, finalists, and winners. Each entry must include answers to the five questions below, 800-word maximum for each question.

 View Onit AMA SubmissionView Onit AMA Submission

 

Onit Debuts New Company Video

Posted on April 17, 2018 by - Business Process Management, Company News and Events

We’re delighted to announce that we now have a new company video. We’re especially excited because we feel this video captures what Onit is all about: we love our product and empowering customers with a better way to work. It also offers a snapshot of how Onit is positioned to help businesses create better processes, make smarter operations, make informed decisions, and build better business.

Watch the video to learn more about Onit’s innovative technology.

5 Most Popular Enterprise Legal Management Solutions

Posted on April 6, 2018 by - Contract Lifecycle Management, Enterprise Legal Management

Enterprise legal management (ELM) solution come in so many flavors now, that it can be a confusing job just finding the right match for your legal department. Worse yet, there are still ELM software providers out there that are simply regurgitating databases that look or feel better. But there’s so much more to ELM than that – systems of engagement are what you need to be looking for.

We’ve narrowed the field a bit in order to show you the solutions that many legal departments have chosen for their enterprise legal management platform. Some departments start with only one solution and add more as needed. Others feel just one solution is all they need. The point is that if the enterprise legal management platform is flexible to start with, then adding more solutions later or modifying existing ones is never a headache.

The most popular enterprise legal management solutions to solve legal departments’ needs are:

  1. Matter Management – A matter management solution gives you clarity about your overall matter portfolio, so you can make informed, strategic business decisions.
  2. E-Billing – An E-billing solution allows third parties such as law firms and other vendors to submit invoices securely to the corporate legal department for review and payment.
  3. Contract Administration – A contract administration solution lets you quickly manage contracts and business documents in one central location.
  4. Legal Service Requests – A legal service request solution simplifies the intake process and provides a simple portal, so business users can interact with the legal department.
  5. Legal Holds – A legal hold solution helps legal departments notify custodians of their duty to preserve information in a timely manner and guarantee compliance.

We should also mention that any enterprise legal management platform you choose should provide the benefits of cost savings, flexibility, easier collaboration and cutting-edge performance. Finally, watch out for solution providers that have long implementation times.

Your chosen provider should be able to promise an implementation time that’s a fraction of what the rest of the “pack” offer. This is the only proven way to start quickly driving the results you’re seeking and deserve.

5 Problems the Best Contract Management Solutions Can Solve for You

Posted on April 5, 2018 by - Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management

In previous posts last year, we spoke about features you should be looking for in a premier contract management solution. We’d like to keep the momentum going on this topic by discussing some very common, and major problems that the best contract management solutions can solve for you.

Before we get to the problems, we’d like to make something clear: contracting is more complex than ever before, and this unfortunate trend is expected to continue. One reason is that standard, “universal” contracts are a thing of the past now as clients are demanding more personalized contracts. What’s needed is a simple and reliable process for getting new contracts into the system, approving those contracts and then managing and storing them. Business, legal, and even financial contract approvers should have access to one central location to collaborate and approve contracts as they move through the contract lifecycle process. Now, let’s have a look at the problems.

Problem #1: The contract management process is unnecessarily complex.

This is the 21st century and we need to press “delete” on this problem. The top contract management solutions allow you to easily collaborate with reviewers and departments directly. Email updates may be sent to contracts through an assigned unique email address, and email notifications will be configured for multiple events, including new contract requests, comments, tasks, updates and documents. The best solutions simplify the submission, review, approval and management of contracts in one easy-to-use tool. Team members should never have to search their inbox or hard drive for the latest version or keep an Excel spreadsheet to manage their contracts. And if your CM solution is part of a broader, more comprehensive enterprise legal management system, so much the better.

Problem #2: A decentralized and confusing repository.

A complete, centralized contract repository allows users to organize lifecycle information such as participants, documents, milestones, negotiations, status reports, key dates and provisions. Systematic categorization, clarity, versioning and easy storage of documents are some key benefits of such a repository. A single source for all sales collateral and other customer-facing content is a key element of the best CM solutions, as well as contract lifecycle management solutions.

Problem #3: The lack of visibility.

Centralizing your contracts allows visibility throughout their lifecycle. You can see a document’s history, including all previous versions and can create reports based on any data field in a personalized dashboard. Part of what exacerbates the speed vs. control dilemma for legal is a general lack of visibility into contract terms, obligations and value. If you can’t see it, you can’t control it. This becomes a major pain point because agreements outline the terms of the value exchanged. If you can’t ensure you are getting the right value for your deals, money is slipping through your company’s fingers.

Problem #4: Inflexible workflow.

The best solutions allow workflow to be configured relative to a contract type or matched to your unique business needs. It’s important to have a mechanism for managing changes over time. You need to be up-to-speed on renewal dates, pricing changes, emerging legal requirements and other events that will require you to speak to your customer/vendor specifically about your contractual relationship. Your ability to manage the contract, particularly changes over time and the renewal process, will have a direct impact on your customer retention rate.

Problem #5: Weak reporting and analytics.

Why would this even still be a problem today? A powerful, straightforward dashboard allows stakeholders to quickly view and analyze the department’s progress on contracts and certain bottlenecks that may appear. Powerful business analytics and reporting engines are additional hallmarks of the best solutions and are crucial in helping team members with their reporting, configuring notifications and other tasks.

These are the main problems we’ve noted over the years, but the list could go on and on. Choosing a provider that is always on top of their game is a sure-fire way to rest assured your money is well spent. By the way, it’s quite possible to purchase a contract administration solution, and also a separate contract review and approval solution. Better still, if you choose to use a contract lifecycle management solution, you’ll have the best of both worlds: a convenient combination of contract administration and contract review and approval all in one package.

Onit Client TIAA to Present at Annual Corporate Legal Operations Institute in Las Vegas

Posted on March 30, 2018 by - Company News and Events

Onit is especially excited about this year’s Annual Corporate Legal Operations Institute in Las Vegas during 22-25 April. Onit’s client TIAA will present a session called, “Process and Technology: Transforming A Law Department to Achieve Legal Department Efficiency.” 

Brad Rogers, Chief Operations Officer and Chief of Staff for Law, Compliance, Government & Regulatory Affairs, and Corporate Secretary at TIAA will be presenting. In this session, you’ll learn how TIAA recognized that there is a revolution underway in the legal industry and saw an opportunity to transform their legal department to drive up value while more effectively deploying both budget and talent. Brad will discuss how they optimized legal services delivery to a Fortune 100 company with millions in legal spend, and the importance of bringing together law department employees and vendor partners from across the world and how a comprehensive technology platform with capabilities rooted in process, workflow and collaboration is changing the way they run their legal business and support their corporate clients. He will also share lessons learned from the selection and implementation process as well as early results from their outside counsel convergence program.

To learn more about this year’s Institute, click here.

New Podcast: A Simple Way to Automate Business Processes

Posted on March 22, 2018 by - Business Process Management, Company News and Events

Onit is excited to introduce our latest podcast! In this episode, Jonathan Powers discusses Onit’s Apptitude solution (a business process automation platform), and how he loves empowering people who will be building solutions on the platform. Jonathan begins by succinctly illustrating how Apptitude is sort of a “blank canvas” on which clients can “paint” to solve specific problems. Expanding on this theme, he describes how clients can configure Apptitude to solve business process management problems. There are no vertical specific objects built into Apptitude; in other words, it doesn’t know what a contract is, or a legal matter, etc., but rather the client (or Onit) teaches it what those things are, and then productizes their configuration. This then becomes the starting point for future projects, such as e-billing, matter management, legal holds and contract management solutions.

Jonathan goes on to provide some good examples of solutions developed on Apptitude such as legal service requests, phased-based budgeting and matter management reports. He wraps things up by reinforcing that Apptitude is a tool for solving your problems, and why automating solutions shouldn’t be a frightening or intimidating proposition.

Onit’s Apptitude provides the foundation for solutions across your business. Apptitude has transformed some of largest global companies to become more agile, efficient and effective. In fact, Apptitude has more than 100 pre-built business process management actions available to build workflows.

Solutions are easy to create with Apptitude, and some workflows can be implemented in less than 30 minutes. Apptitude is an innovative tool that makes it easy to create, modify and deploy new processes with robust workflow, transaction management and reporting capabilities. Using Apptitude, Onit helps customers solve real business problems without the need for costly support, training or IT infrastructure.

We have more podcasts coming your way soon, and we look forward to your joining us! Here is a link to this podcast.

Five Must-Have Features in a Workflow, Process & Collaboration Platform

Posted on March 19, 2018 by - Business Process Management, Enterprise Legal Management

Business process automation (BPA) platforms have been around for years. It can be an overwhelming task trying to decide which one is just right for your business. When it comes to state-of-the-art enterprise solution (or “app”) development, you must have the workflow, process and collaboration platform that is the best fit. In other words, software also needs to fit the collaborative way that business is now done. These are the reasons that a cutting-edge, collaborative platform is critical.

We now almost take for granted certain features we need in such a platform: no-code configuration, rapid value delivery, responsive user interface, and adaptive end user experience. But it should also be highly human-centric with certain simple capabilities — a simple intake form, a shared workspace, configured and ad hoc workflow, and a dashboard to view all of your transactions.

The platform should centralize all data, notes, documents, conversations and email threads in one location. Business teams should have real-time visibility into the process—whether it is a contract negotiation, NDA request or sales quote approval. It should easy to configure custom forms, fields, checklists, workflows and process tracking capabilities with the flexibility to make changes and improvements in-stream as often as required.

So, knowing the basic things needed, what are five features that you need to be looking for in the best BPA platforms?

  1. Short Development Time – A simple process pilot can be ready for implementation in hours and in production within days.
  2. Flexible – Technology that provides business users with the flexibility to route, comment, revise and track progress of the project to accommodate the variability and unpredictability inherent in knowledge work.
  3. Standard Intuitive Interface – A simple intuitive interface allows the user to focus on the “process” instead of the application.
  4. A Hands-On Approach – Business users can optimize their processes quickly using an agile approach, unlike traditional software customization that requires the development of process maps and workflow design.
  5. Cost Savings – Solutions developed with the platform should be a fraction of the cost of standard business process automation software and traditional enterprise systems.

We fully agree that the task of finding just the right BPA platform can be daunting, to say the least. But if you proceed in your quest armed with the knowledge of what you need to be looking for, you’re already a giant step ahead.

To learn more about Onit’s Apptitude platform, listen to our most recent podcast.

Onit Customer Jaguar Land Rover Featured in Corporate Counsel Business Journal for Transforming Legal Department with Enterprise Legal Management Solution

Posted on March 12, 2018 by - Company News and Events

We’re pleased to announce that we’ve been featured in the March/April edition of Corporate Counsel Business Journal (CCBJ) with our customer Jaguar Land Rover. We’re especially excited about this article, “Transforming the Legal Department: ELM Solution Puts Information at Everyone’s Fingertips,” as it showcases how we partnered with Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) in providing their enterprise legal management (ELM) solution. The article details how JLR drove change in the legal department with process efficiencies and Onit’s technology to better manage legal operations and legal spend. Readers will also learn:

  • Reasons why JLR needed a premier enterprise legal management solution, and why Onit was their partner of choice
  • Their successful partnership with Onit in building, testing and deploying e-billing and matter management technology
  • How they automated workflows to gain a quick overview of all on-going matters and transactions
  • How they effectively leveraged IT business partners early in the process to realize their implementation goals
  • Early results from gaining visibility into their legal spend (i.e. operational and financial results)
  • Lessons learned from the selection and implementation process

As Anna-Lisa Corrales, General Counsel of JLR puts it, “Onit’s ELM solution was just differently organized than other systems we had seen, and we really liked it because all the information was at our fingertips. And in today’s highly connected world, where information is spread across devices and in the cloud, that is more important than ever.”

To see the full article in CCBJ, click here.

Onit’s CEO Eric Elfman to Judge the 2018 Rice University Business Plan Competition for 17th Consecutive Year

Posted on March 8, 2018 by - Company News and Events

Onit’s CEO and co-founder Eric M. Elfman will serve as a judge for the 2018 Rice University Business Plan Competition. Scheduled for April 5-7, the program is known as the world’s richest and largest graduate-level business plan competition.

This will be the 17th year that Elfman has judged the competition, which is hosted by the Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship and the Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Business. The competition has grown from nine teams competing for $10,000 in prize money in 2001 to 42 teams from around the world competing for more than $1.5 million in cash and prizes. More than 130 past competitors have gone on to successfully launch their businesses, raising in excess of $600 million in funding.

The competition is designed to give collegiate entrepreneurs a real-world experience to fine tune their business plans and elevator pitches to generate funding to successfully commercialize their product. Judges will evaluate the teams as real-world entrepreneurs soliciting start-up funds from early stage investors and venture capital firms. The judges are asked to rank the presentations based on which company they would most likely invest. The participants will experience a diverse program over the course of three-days; with significant time designated for feedback and interaction with the judging panel.

During the competition, the entrepreneurial teams “pitch” both their business plans and visions to the judges. Each presentation is graded by the judges as if they were venture capital investors themselves. The winner of the competition is the business that the judges would most likely invest in based on the quality of the idea, the strength of the management team and the clarity and persuasiveness of the written plan and oral presentation.

To learn more about the competition, click here.

Onit and Client Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) Featured in Legal Evolution

Posted on February 28, 2018 by - Business Process Management, Company News and Events

After Onit’s and Archer Daniels Midland’s (ADM) joint ACC Value Challenge 2017 win, you’d think the smoke would’ve started clearing by now. Imagine our surprise when we saw the fantastic write-up by Bill Henderson in Legal Evolution, titled, “Successful technology adoption: David Cambria (ADM) and Eric Elfman (Onit) Discuss their Collaboration.“

The article encapsulates how Onit collaborated with ADM on a high-profile global legal technology project. ADM’s legal department needed workflow automation that didn’t require their lawyers to change, and also substantial productivity gains. By partnering with Onit, ADM was able to leverage technology and their new platform solution to reach all corners of the law department beyond legal and spend management.

Henderson also offers an enticing look into how Onit came into being and touches on how the book “Crossing the Chasm” by Geoffrey Moore, had significant influence on Eric M. Elfman, CEO and co-founder of Onit. The thesis of the book is the “big fish, small pond” strategy, which suggests that companies should focus the efforts of key personnel on a niche market. Having done this and then developing a “whole product” solution, the company can then cross the chasm into mainstream.

The article also plays fair and mentions the high risks involved when small companies try to cross the chasm by attempting to focus on niches like legal technology. This in mind, Henderson ended his write-up by noting an observation that Elfman made, “…technology startups are essentially a series of experiments until something works or you run out of money.” Good for Onit that things worked well.

Click here to read the entire article. To read more about our joint ACC Value Challenge win, click here.