CONTRACTS MANAGEMENT FOR CORPORATE LEGAL

The Company

The corporate legal department for one of the world’s largest technology companies.

The Situation

This corporate legal department, consisting of more than 1200 people worldwide, handles millions of documents a year—from contracts, mergers, and acquisitions documents, to intellectual property filings and more. When the company contacted Zia to review their project, documents were stored in email systems and shared drives. These documents were hard to search and find, lacked proper version control, and were difficult to share both internally and externally. In addition, major security concerns existed around email accounts being hacked, leaving proprietary information exposed. However, users liked the ease of use with this method of storing and retrieving their own documents.

The company had twice previously attempted to build a complete content management solution themselves, however, both projects failed to meet their needs of control, compliance, security, and simplicity.

In addition, they had reviewed virtually all of the traditional enterprise content management (ECM) vendors on the market but did not find a product that met their needs.

The Process

Zia Consulting began the project with a discovery and process assessment. Initially, three departments within corporate legal were assessed for ECM solution implementation. Once the right department was identified, Zia began to build a roadmap for the project which detailed the assessment findings and the agile project delivery methods of Zia. Ultimately, Zia and the customer chose the implementation and customization of Alfresco Enterprise for the project.

The Solution

Zia began to build a contracts management solution with the goal of being feature rich yet easy to use, with little to no training required. Within Alfresco, Zia created multiple roles to define access to information within the ECM system. These roles were highly customized by department and user type. A set of rules and behaviors were created to build a management process without workflow—in essence, the “heavy lifting” happened behind the scenes. Context menus were built with the most common actions provided and an organized taxonomy was created for each group.

As it was especially important to the company that the content management tools work in the same manner their employees did, so having email and desktop software integration was critical.

Utilizing Alfresco features, users were able to email their documents directly into the repository as well as drag and drop them in from the desktop or other files. From a simple form, users were able to quickly create new projects and send alerts, set statuses, and kick-off processes.

On the system administration side, upgrading the Alfresco software was simplified as the user interface was configured rather than customized. Zia applied several major upgraded features to the complete solution without any impact or delay to the business users.

The Results

This project has resulted in a smart, simple, and effective ECM solution. The corporate legal team is able to continue using the same tools they were previously using to manage documents such as Office, Adobe, and email—but, with the power of a content hub behind them. Use of the system does not require substantial training, as requested by the company; instead, Zia produced three-minute videos with succinct demonstrations.

With the Zia contracts management solution, the company is saving a substantial amount of time as projects are kick-started and tracked in a timely manner. They also save money by increasing productivity and decreasing duplication of effort and mistakes. Most importantly, Zia met the project security needs without sacrificing ease-of-use.

This solution has been adopted by the corporate legal team worldwide with more than 1200 users on the system; millions of files have been moved from email and share drives into the system which properly stores and tracks important documents.