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Becky Holloway and simon Erdély

The Cost of Missing a Contract Milestone

Companies come to us grappling with all sorts of contract issues, and nothing makes us happier than being able to help them overcome these challenges. Whether it’s finding new sources of revenue or preventing margin erosion, each customer has a story to tell. This story is one a lot of companies can relate to — the pain of missing contract milestones.

Contracts Everywhere

nextSource is a managed services organization, connecting companies with the talent they need to accelerate commercial success. Due to the nature of nextSource’s business, they generate a high volume of contracts – each of their client contracts also has a large number of associated supplier contracts. Keeping up with the exponential volume proved to be a great source of operational strain for nextSource, especially as they handled them without a fully automated system.

The Cost of Missed Dates

Coincidentally, and to further underscore the critical need for a better way of managing their contracts, nextSource’s CRM contract had auto-renewed and there was no reminder to the designated member of the company to handle the renewal or cancellation. In the midst of selecting a new CRM solution which would cost only 27% of the current CRM solution’s price, they discovered that they were now locked into 12 more months with the existing vendor at the higher price. Clearly, it was time to get the contract situation under control.

Manual Strain

Contracts were stored in a variety of formats, including shared drives, emails, and some older ones in hard copies. Without a technology solution to manage these contracts, nextSource really wanted a way to keep track of all of them, especially critical events like contract expiration and renewals. While a designated contracting admin was responsible for all of the contracts, if that employee was unavailable, things would get delayed. Tracking contract terms and expiration dates via spreadsheets required a significant amount of time and energy to keep it updated and accurate.

Choosing Malbek Leads to Fast ROI

The nextSource team researched a few CLM vendors besides Malbek, and, in the end, chose Malbek Contrax as their solution. Once Malbek was selected, implementation progressed following a phased model. This agile approach allowed nextSource to realize the benefits of the solution much faster. The ability to search and track executed contracts in the system was a quick win with a fast ROI.

The Heart of CLM

While nexSource had mainly been looking for a repository for its contracts, Malbek introduced them to the heart of CLM, authoring, workflows, e-signature, and milestone reminders. This functionality enabled nextSource to leverage CLM to its fullest potential and ensure that a contract would never take them by surprise again. Despite the fact that this was totally new territory for nextSource, training was seamless thanks to Malbek’s simple and intuitive user interface. Changes could easily be made to the system through user configuration tools, and integrating with outside platforms, like Adobe Sign, was done in just a few clicks without any customizations. To top it all off, now executive leadership began receiving automated reminders about upcoming expirations and could easily run reports well in advance to understand contracts terms.

Not Just a Vendor, But a Partner

In addition, as a by-product of working with the experienced Malbek team during implementation, nextSource was able to collaborate with Malbek to improve contract efficiency.  Implementing with best practices and creative configurations has led nextSource to view Malbek not just as a vendor, but as a trusted partner.