Category: Business Process Management

What do all businesses have in common? 

No matter what industry, products, services or customers, all businesses need processes. And successful businesses have flexible processes that can scale with demand as well as the right tools to support it.

Fortune® 500 and AmLaw 100 legal organizations are no different. Despite practicing law from different perspectives, the success of their organizations depends on their dexterity to respond to the demand for services as well as the ability to provide enhanced legal services. And an intriguing technology that is quickly emerging as a forerunner for enabling efficient and cost-effective processes is Smart Business Process Apps.

Defined by Forrester as “A new category of application software designed to support business activities that are people-intensive, highly variable, loosely structured and subject to frequent change,” these Apps are driving an elevated level of success in legal organizations.

In October, Onit will present a series of breakfast meetings that share how highly regarded organizations including The Home Depot, APCO Worldwide and Pepper Hamilton rely on Smart Business Process Apps to manage risk, increase responsiveness to clients, improve the productivity of attorneys and drive greater transparency around their portfolio of work.  

The first meeting – scheduled for Tuesday, October 8 in Atlanta – features Libby Troughton, Senior Manager in The Home Depot’s Legal IT department, who will discuss the company’s legal department business challenges, the need for the Onit ReviewAI & Approval App to improve performance,   the strategy they developed to implement it and the business results they’ve achieved.  

The roadshow continues on Wednesday, October 9 in Washington, D.C., as Jonathan Friedman, Assistant General Counsel APCO Worldwide, will share the reasons his legal department selected Smart Business Process Apps from Onit, how they were implemented and the results the legal team has seen to date.

On Tuesday, October 10, the roadshow continues to Boston. There, Peter Secor, Pepper Hamilton’s Director of Strategic Pricing and Project Management, will review the firms Alternative Fee Arrangement (AFA) processes and how Onit’s AFA Submission and Approval App helps the firm work towards its clients’ interests and supports the forecasting and budgeting processes critical to making the issue of pricing transparent so clients aren’t surprised about their legal bills.  

To learn more about these breakfast meetings or to register, visit https://onitprostg.wpengine.com/new-era-seminars. 

Sometimes the smartest solution is the simplest one. For example, would you rather light a fire with flint and steel or a match?

For years, large organizations have struggled with how to handle processes effectively and efficiently. In the evolution to move beyond paper-based operations, most corporations have defaulted to enterprise-wide solutions that ultimately prove to be bulky, expensive and overly structured in a manner that inhibited quick accommodation to sophisticated and changing processes.

That’s where Smart Process Apps come in. These flexible Apps can be deployed in hours and are responsive enough to ensure process compliance. They sidestep the complexities and costs of enterprise solutions while offering the user-friendly interface today’s users demand.

Here’s how one global company used Smart Process Apps to expedite their contract review process.

As one of the world’s largest business services firms for sales and marketing, ZS Associates has more than 20 offices worldwide and works with 700 companies in 70 countries across multiple industries. In 2013, the business adopted Smart Process Apps to expedite and add efficiency to its contract review process.

Contract review and approval is often one of the most arduous and time-consuming processes for a corporation.  A proper review means multiple parties – internal sales and legal professionals coupled with a client’s stakeholders – need to access, edit and comment on the contract’s content. It’s an intensively collaborative process that is often difficult to manage, track and report on. The company initially relied on spreadsheets and databases to track agreements but found the tools were only effective for short-term use and extremely time consuming.

The adoption of a Smart Process App enabled more agile client relations, easy collaboration and ultimately operational effectiveness by eliminating the manual steps of the process and automating them. As a result, reviewers could discover where contracts were, who completed the last revision, if/why a contract was blocked and what the next steps were in the process – which resulted in the ability to significantly expedite the approval process for business- and revenue-dependent contracts.

More and more companies are adopting Smart Process Apps to help with processes ranging from contract review to matter management to employee onboarding.

Take a tour of the New Products Works Facility in Ann Arbor, Mich., and you’ll find a variety of products that – at one time – were considered interesting or maybe even innovative. There’s a BBQ marinade with a spray pump top. An egg concoction shaped like a bagel for easy toasting. Even a carbonated Arnold Palmer with an unfortunate name.

This façade for flops displays more than 120,000 food, beverage and health and beauty products from as far back as the ‘70s. They represent ideas that, in the long term, just didn’t make the cut. And now retired or defunct they hold a spot on this museum’s shelf.

This makes me wonder – when it comes to contract review and approval, will we soon see commonly adopted tools such as Outlook and Excel take a back seat to more innovative applications? 

Think about this: A recent survey discovered that 82.7% of legal department respondents indicated that their workloads have increased compared with the previous year, with more than 50% estimating that the workloads have increased by 10-30%. This, combined with a somewhat reduction in in-house hiring, means that a premium must be placed upon achieving a greater numberof tasks while reducing or refining the process associated with accomplishing them.

Take contract review and approval.  For most legal departments, this is a time- (and sigh-) inducing task. Contracts enter the review process and fall into a process that is scattered across spreadsheets, documents and emails. It’s hard to execute them quickly through revisions and inquiries and there’s very little transparency and communal history into the overall process.

So instead of struggling through a complex process with software that is ill-suited for the task, it’s time to turn to the proper tool for contract review and approval – Smart Business Process Apps. Smart Business Process Apps centralize contract activity, maintain version control, and provide real-time insight for all stakeholders.

This eBook offers an alternative to emails, spreadsheets and documents to manage your legal department and delves into how some legal departments have turned to Smart Business Process Apps to streamline routine legal tasks and reduce processing time.

Maybe next time we take a virtual tour of the New Products Works Facility we’ll see another addition to its shelves.

How organized are you? If your client asks for a copy of a contract from two years ago, can you find it in minutes? Seconds? Or do you find yourself wasting hours by drudging through piles of files and canyons of paper?

If you’re relying on paper-, email or spreadsheet-based processes for contract administration, chances are you won’t be able to keep an accurate track of contracts.  The lack of a central repository means there is no easily accessible access to the contract library and the ability to perform robust searches.  It’s difficult to correlate specific communications – especially ones from two years ago – with the right contract. You can lose track of renewal dates or even pull up the wrong version of a contract. 

Don’t make contract administration difficult. The right tools – such as the Onit Contract Administration App – can streamline, automate and access the contract information you need in the snap of a finger. But don’t take my word for it. Check out how Amy and Ben handle contract administration.