Sevita + Concord
“Many hours saved, many dollars saved in contracts that we meant to terminate and forgot.”
– Jennifer Neville, associate Corporate general counsel at Sevita
Challenges
Prior to using Concord, Sevita did not have a contract management process in place. Their thousands of contracts were locally housed and managed throughout the company, without legal contract oversight. Some major purchase documents were supervised by procurement, but besides that, there was not a standard contract management process. With Sevita being a large company with over thirty thousand employees at the time, they experienced issues and losses due to not having well-defined contract management procedures.
Many of Sevita’s challenges were associated with the lack of efficient contract oversight. Firstly, the company sometimes faced compliance issues, as access to documents and their content was difficult. Financial losses were also incurred by missing contract renewal deadlines. Moreover, the inability to oversee vendor contracts led to difficulties with cost evaluation and negotiating better agreement terms. The lack of a contract management process also created issues during audits, as it was difficult to find the needed documents.
Solution
In 2019, Jennifer Neville, Sevita’s Associate General Counsel, Corporate, was brought into the company, with one of her tasks being the creation of a company-wide contract management process. She became part of a team tasked with finding and implementing the best possible solution to manage Sevita’s contracts.
The company hired a marketing consultant to perform a market analysis, and that is how they learned about Concord, which joined other CLM providers in Sevita’s RFI and RFP processes. As a large entity, Sevita needed a provider that would meet its security standards and would be flexible and broad enough to handle many different types of contracts and workflows.
Ultimately, Sevita chose Concord as their contract lifecycle management system based on three main factors. Firstly, Concord accommodated the company’s need for flexibility related to contract types, contract workflows, and approvals. Secondly, Sevita appreciated Concord’s built-in e-signature feature. Other CLM systems either did not provide it and required integration with other e-signature platforms or charged additional per-user fees, while Concord allows for an unlimited number of e-signatures with no added costs. The last reason for Sevita’s choice was Concord’s real-time editing functionality. During their testing of CLM software, they found that in other systems the editing features were inconvenient and burdensome. The company also appreciated Concord’s cost-effectiveness.
Results
Sevita wanted one tool for end-to-end contract lifecycle management that would allow for flexibility, and they are satisfied with having chosen Concord to reach this goal. Various Sevita teams send out and track thousands of documents per week, including vendor contracts, employment contracts, patients’ documentation, and property leases. Concord allowed them to map out all of their different processes for different teams in one system, which has solved the issue of lack of contract oversight.
The company appreciates the real-time editing feature inside the system, especially the fact that changes and comments on one document can either be made internally, or shared with third parties. This allows Sevita to keep the whole negotiation and editing history in one place. There’s no more need to send countless emails back-and-forth and later waste time searching for needed information.
“ Many hours saved, many dollars saved in contracts that we meant to terminate and forgot. ”– Jennifer Neville, associate Corporate general counsel at Sevita
Having a company-wide contract lifecycle management system has brought Sevita many savings. The company gained oversight into their contracts, which has especially helped with keeping track of deadlines. “I don’t think we’ve paid out a contract since we’ve implemented Concord because now we can track when the notice is coming up”, said Jennifer Neville, Sevita’s Corporate Associate General Counsel. Jennifer also stated that using Concord saves her team many hours of work each week. Most importantly, Sevita employees from various departments who are responsible for contracts are pleased with the new contract management process enabled by Concord.