Empowering Procurement through Contract Standardization

A Malbek success story about Momentive’s SurveyMonkey contract management transformation.

As an agile experience management company, SurveyMonkey, was founded with the mission to help industry leaders quickly and confidently make important decisions, take action, and achieve tangible results. As the organization’s global presence has continued to grow, its supplier agreement volume began to skyrocket, which presented a steep challenge for its Procurement team to manage contracts consistently and seamlessly without the benefit of a centralized repository. Learn how SurveyMonkey’s Procurement team transformed contract management with Malbek by creating standardized contract templates, streamlining Legal workflows, building a pre-approved clause library, and integrating with Coupa to improve access to supplier data.

Key Insights

Following in the footsteps of its Legal department, SurveyMonkey's Procurement team implemented Malbek to increase contract visibility and improve workflows. 1

The team’s favorite Malbek features are contract templates, clause library, and approval workflows.
2

The team’s contract management transformation has reduced contract cycle times by 50% when standardized templates are used, and has significantly decreased the demand for Legal involvement. 3

The Challenge

When Jeanette Milano, Head of Procurement at SurveyMonkey, was asked to describe the challenges her team faced before implementing a CLM solution, she only had to say one word: VISIBILITY. Since many departments rely on Procurement for product, resource, and service agreements, it was a major challenge to maintain visibility into contract status for so many agreement types without a central, searchable repository.

Procurement’s lack of visibility, paired with its high contract volume, presented a daunting challenge due to the broad spectrum of commodities they manage and purchase. One of the difficulties with managing a variety of goods and services is the multiple types of risks associated with each. SurveyMonkey needed a platform that could bring consistency to buy-side contracting and support its growing Procurement function.

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The Solution

That’s where Malbek comes in. After SurveyMonkey selected Malbek as its comprehensive CLM solution, the Procurement team implemented the following features to support its business needs and initiatives:

Contract Templates

The Procurement team began by identifying where they were seeing the most volume on the contract spectrum. Starting with software, professional services, and marketing purchases as the core areas of focus, contract templates were created to outline these transactions at a high level with room for customization as needed

Legal Workflows

To take it a step further, knowing that one template would not fit all buying scenarios, the team incorporated their playbook to propose standard fallback language that would accelerate supplier negotiations. Now, when a supplier pushes back on SurveyMonkey’s positions, Procurement managers are empowered to manage negotiations with variations of the organization’s preferred positions built right into the template. Best of all, these fallback positions have been pre-approved by Legal.

Clause Library

Building upon the standardization of SurveyMonkey's positions, the next step was to create a full clause library, further empowering the Procurement team to utilize standard pre-approved language without having to go back to Legal during each negotiation cycle.

Coupa Integration

With contracts being managed and stored primarily in Malbek, the team wanted to be able to access its supplier and purchase requisition data in Coupa without duplication or manual entry, so they connected the two systems using Malbek’s seamless integration marketplace.

The Results

Implementing new technology was only a small piece of SurveyMonkey’s contract management transformation. Beyond the adoption of a new tool, the real game-changer was the development of new processes facilitated within Malbek, that improved collaboration between Legal and Procurement.

First, by standardizing complex contract processes with templates and a pre-approved clause library, contract cycle times have been reduced by 50%

“I can’t sing the praises of templates enough. Where we are able to use a template, we are reducing the time to close by 50%. Having pre-approved clauses and fallbacks built into the system empowers my team to do a lot on their own, which saves a lot of time.”

-Jeanette Milano

Head of Procurement at SurveyMonkey

Secondly, eliminating the use of multiple contract sources and transitioning to a centralized repository has reduced risk and simplified version control.

Now, there’s no need to remember where the last version of a contract was saved or who negotiated what. Everyone (based on their permissions) has full visibility into contract workflows and can quickly review status updates and approvals in real time.

Lastly, Procurement and Legal now speak a common language and collaborate seamlessly within one platform.

With built-in, pre-approved clause language and standardized workflows, calling upon Legal for help is now the exception, not the rule. Sometimes improving collaboration between teams means reducing the need for collaboration altogether, so stakeholders can shift their focus to larger initiatives. When the two teams came together to identify gaps in the contract management process, they were able to configure workflows in Malbek that they could grow into, instead of out of, protecting against the need to reinvent the wheel each time.

“The main efficiency these processes have created is the reduction of impact to Legal resources. That has been transformative, and also, it’s great that Procurement can execute and manage contracts on their own without coming back to Legal.”

Ewa Hugh

Head of Legal Operations at SurveyMonkey

Legal Operations also implemented Malbek to support its contracting initiatives, and both teams agree that the power of the platform lies in its ability to scale, meeting the unique needs of each business unit within the same organization, uniting the enterprise.

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