Group-wide trans­par­ency on con­tracts and cor­por­ate doc­u­ments

Initial situ­ation in con­tract man­age­ment.
Vi­bra­cous­tic is an in­ter­na­tion­al group em­ploy­ing around 10,000 people at 43 loc­a­tions in 19 coun­tries world­wide. Before the in­tro­duc­tion of the special soft­ware otris con­tract, each group company managed con­tracts and cor­por­ate doc­u­ments with dif­fer­ent stand-alone IT solu­tions. This not only made access to in­form­a­tion dif­fi­cult, but also limited ef­fi­ciency im­prove­ments through uniform process flows.

Am­bi­tious goals
With the in­tro­duc­tion of the new otris soft­ware, the group’s legal de­part­ment ini­ti­ated a project for company-wide stand­ard­isa­tion in con­tract man­age­ment in order to achieve the fol­low­ing goals:

• Trans­par­ency across all (rel­ev­ant) con­tracts and cor­por­ate doc­u­ments.
• A leading system that provides the current data status
  (single source of truth)

• Better iden­ti­fic­a­tion and man­age­ment of com­pli­ance risks arising from con­tract content
• Ef­fi­ciency im­prove­ments in the entire con­tract hand­ling process
• Sim­pli­fy­ing col­lab­or­a­tion in the con­tract draft­ing process / re­du­cing re­dund­ant work
• En­sur­ing ef­fect­ive­ness and ef­fi­ciency in the man­age­ment of con­tract events through im­proved in­form­a­tion sharing
• Easier access to rel­ev­ant con­tract in­form­a­tion for all au­thor­ised staff
• Use claims from ex­ist­ing con­trac­tu­al re­la­tion­ships op­tim­ally for day-to-day busi­ness

“The basic tech­nic­al re­quire­ment for achiev­ing our am­bi­tious goals was clear: a uniform soft­ware system for con­tract man­age­ment through­out the group,” ex­plains Dr Mein­hard Bartsch, General Counsel and Chief Com­pli­ance Officer at Vi­bra­cous­tic. “With otris, we have found the right pro­vider for our project”.

Con­tracts and cor­por­ate doc­u­ments
Vi­bra­cous­tic opted for the com­bined use of the con­tract man­age­ment soft­ware otris con­tract and the in­vest­ment man­age­ment soft­ware otris cor­por­ate. The com­bin­a­tion sim­pli­fies the man­age­ment of all con­tracts from the op­er­a­tion­al busi­ness (e.g. leasing con­tracts, sup­pli­er con­tracts, project con­tracts) and all cor­por­ate doc­u­ments (e.g. M&A doc­u­ments, meeting minutes, NDAs). Even though the range of doc­u­ment types is large – each doc­u­ment can be quickly sorted into the des­ig­nated digital file and thus also quickly re­trieved.

This is made pos­sible by the clear struc­ture of the soft­ware: the system depicts the group with all its sub­si­di­ar­ies as a file plan and also as an or­gani­gram. The or­gani­gram shows the in­ter­con­nec­ted­ness of the in­di­vidu­al group com­pan­ies and sim­pli­fies nav­ig­a­tion. After click­ing on a company, the user can choose whether he wants to have the con­tracts from the op­er­at­ive busi­ness or the cor­por­ate doc­u­ments dis­played. The doc­u­ments of both cat­egor­ies are struc­tured ac­cord­ing to a uniform stand­ard for each company.

In prac­tice
The system is used by Vi­bra­cous­tic com­pan­ies world­wide. The re­spons­ible em­ploy­ees in the spe­cial­ist de­part­ments access the system via their user ac­counts in order to re­search in­form­a­tion and main­tain the data and doc­u­ments. By means of au­thor­isa­tion set­tings, each user only sees the data and doc­u­ments that are rel­ev­ant to him or her. The man­age­ment at the head office has a com­plete over­view of all con­tracts and cor­por­ate doc­u­ments. This sim­pli­fies the eval­u­ation of con­tract con­tents and risk man­age­ment based on them. Also greatly sim­pli­fied: the con­tract cre­ation and ap­prov­al pro­ced­ures. The in­teg­rated clause man­age­ment speeds up the pre­par­a­tion of con­tract tem­plates. In a down­stream process, a draft con­tract is routed through the company for editing and ap­prov­al ac­cord­ing to pre­defined cri­ter­ia. “The con­tract editing and ap­prov­al process is a centrepiece of the new con­tract man­age­ment system,” Dr Mein­hard Bartsch cla­ri­fies the rel­ev­ance. “We are working on con­tinu­ously im­prov­ing and re­fin­ing the pro­cesses. During the im­ple­ment­a­tion of each new work­flow com­pon­ent, otris con­sult­ing sup­ports us com­pet­ently and with great com­mit­ment,” the lawyer sum­mar­ises the co­oper­a­tion with otris.