Analyst Perspectives
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Ineffective control and management of supplier contracts cost businesses $153 billion per year in missed savings opportunities.
— Aberdeen Group
Non-intrusive automation solutions, like UpsideContract, can provide the necessary foundation to streamline contract cycles, improve contract visibility, and drive
compliance and risk management strategies.
— Tim Minahan, Vice President, Supply Chain Research, Aberdeen Group
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Companies could realize savings that equate to 2% of total annual costs by eliminating inaccuracies and non-compliance through
contract automation.
— PricewaterhouseCoopers
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A typical Fortune 1000 organization has between 20,000-40,000 contracts and spends as much as 100 basis points of their revenue to manage buy-side contracts and 25 basis points of their revenue to manage sell-side contracts.
— Goldman Sachs
The market for contract management software will hit $3.1 billion US by 2005 as organizations begin to understand the potential and ROI of such solutions.
— Goldman Sachs
Enterprises could experience a potential reduction of 40 basis points in hard and soft costs by using contract management software.
— Goldman Sachs
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By year end 2008, in 80 percent of enterprises, the cost of contract management will have doubled from the 2002 costs of 2 percent to 4 percent of
SGA.
— Gartner
Enterprises will be spending more than $20 billion a year on software and services for contract life cycle management by then end of 2007.
— Gartner
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Of 50 corporations responding to a survey on contract management software deployments, the majority (51%) reported no automated contract management process; only 11% have a full-fledged implementation, either custom-built or as part of their ERP system. Of the 38% with a partial system, many reported this as an internal tracking mechanism, often built on a database such as Access, and only 16% of those had any links to other systems.
— IACCM
These (UpsideContract version 4) enhancements illustrate the rapid progress and maturing of contract management software. Upside's success in a growing range of major corporate clients is a clear demonstration that they are a leading contender in this fast-growing market. The flexibility they are seeking to introduce will further extend the potential scope and value of their solution and directly responds to the type of functionality our members describe as important corporations responding to a survey on contract management software deployments, the majority (51%) reported no
automated contract management process; only 11% have a full-fledged implementation, either custom-built or as part of their ERP system. Of the 38% with a partial system, many reported this as an internal tracking mechanism, often built on a database such as Access, and only 16% of those had any links to other systems.
— Tim Cummins, Executive Director, IACCM
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Contracts are arguably the most important documents used by business, and are used in a range of different business contexts, from sales to purchases to employment to partner relationships.
...specialist vendors of sophisticated spend analysis, contract life-cycle management and services procurement applications offer clearly superior products in these new areas.
— Andrew H. Bartels, Giga Research, a wholly owned subsidiary of Forrester Research, Inc.
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Customer Perspectives
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Creation and management of contracts for service-related vendors alone required 14 full-time employees. People working at our facilities across the country had to pick up the phone or send e-mail to request a new contract, at which time we would go through a 16-step manual process that took an average of 30 days. Our only tool was an old mainframe application that was very limited in functionality and couldn’t be integrated with other systems.
Our new contract management solution running on SQL Server 2000 converts a 16-step manual process to a 7-step automated process. As a result, we’ve been able to reduce the number of full-time people required to manage contracts from 14 to 4. They now spend most of their time handling special ‘one-off’ situations, which are added to the system for automation the next time around. There’s no way we could have modified our old mainframe application to provide this kind of rich functionality and automation. The costs would have been astronomical—assuming we could even find the talent—and we would still have needed to extend it to the Web for self-service access.
UpsideContract running on SQL Server 2000 and Windows 2000 Server paid for itself in only 62 days. We had to ask for funding because this was an unplanned project, but the solution was affordable enough that getting the money wasn’t a problem.
Our new solution makes it much easier to verify that we have insurance compliance on all contracts. And
UpsideContract automatically notifies the field when an insurance certificate is due to expire or a contract is up for renewal, which minimizes our exposure due to lack of coverage or an expired service agreement.
— Leigh Ann Vernon,
Asst.
Vice President, Strategic Sourcing, BNSF Railway Company
UpsideBilling has allowed BNSF to dramatically enhance how we handle the large volume of accounts payable invoices from our small and mid-size vendors throughout our network - something that was a fairly manual process until now.
— Brian Ammon, Director, Finance Technology Management,
BNSF Railway Company
UpsideContract is quite an improvement from past practices. There's now quicker turn-around time from beginning to end in a contract's life. There's also better accessibility for BNSF field personnel to view the contracts.
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Andrew Manthei, Director, Governance, SS&S, BNSF Railway Company
UpsideContract was stronger than the other solutions in terms of its flexibility and feature set. And we already had a high level of comfort with SQL Server 2000 and its ease of administration through our e-procurement and online invoicing initiatives.
— Chuck DeBolt, Senior Sourcing Project Manager, BNSF Railway Company
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We look forward to the implementation of this enterprise-wide solution as a mechanism to help us achieve the seamless management of contracts across the University.
We feel it will ease our access to contract information and improve the overall efficiency of
contract management.
It will help GW address all aspects of the contract management cycle, from contract negotiation through everyday
contract management.
— Eve Dubrow, Associate Vice President of Operations, Office of the Executive Vice President
The George Washington University
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We are confident that we have chosen the right solution for managing our purchasing related contracts.
By using UpsideContract we can improve the contract compliance within Interpolis and thus save a lot of time, energy and money. We foresee a drastic decrease in the total time for contract creation. The fact that
UpsideContract is completely based on Microsoft software, especially “.Net”, is important for us. The same goes for the fact that integration with our BackOffice (ERP) systems is very easy.
— Marco Sichtars, Manager, Corporate Procurement, Interpolis
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The Contract Management system must be tightly integrated with our other enterprise-critical systems, including asset management, document management and financials. We evaluated the solution technologies from close to a dozen leading
Contract Management vendors, and found the Upside products best suited to our needs. Rapid deployment potential, high levels of data security and responsiveness to evolving customer needs were other key indicators for us. We were very pleased with the feedback from existing Upside clients in this regard.
— Hitesh Seth, Director of Information Technology, Hydro One
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Upside will enable NS to develop a more flexible system for creating contracts, manage performance and change management.
It will enable NS to better manage the change order process, provide detailed information on the rates, terms and conditions to the end-users in the field, advise when contracts are up for renewal, improve the risk management process and speed the processing of contract documents and invoices.
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Harry Fridge, Director Service Contracts, Norfolk Southern
Fundamental to any process change is the need to implement a system that adds value to our existing processes and allows us to streamline the processing for both suppliers and internal departments.
With the Upside products, we will be able to leverage existing technologies and implement a business process management tool using workflow along with internet access that drives out the inefficiencies of paper-based processing.
— John Rathbone, Senior Vice-President and Controller, Norfolk Southern
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We feel very confident that this type of tracking system will be more accountable to our taxpayers and that's why we are so enthusiastic about the system. Right now there's concern within government about each department doing its own thing, so we're trying to blaze a trail here that other departments will be able to follow.
— Clint Dunford, Minister, Human Resources and Employment, Government of Alberta
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What this (UpsideContract deployment) means is that we will be able to do a more streamlined and efficient job in managing contracts between Capital Health and our suppliers, which will speed up paperwork, reduce duplication and enhance monitoring of contract performance. This translates into cost savings.
This is another step in improving access for suppliers through an integrated CMS, thereby making Capital Health more business friendly.
— Wendy Hill, Chief Operating Officer, Capital Health Regional Support Services
Upside Software was chosen from a list of quality submissions and clearly met the requirements of this project.
— Sheila Weatherill, Capital Health President & CEO
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