A Guide To Success And Flexibility: Navigating CLM System Implementation With John Roland

Made with speech-to-text software, so a few words may be off.

0:00You're listening to the Contract Heroes Podcast, your one-stop shop for all things contract management. And now here are your hosts, Marc and Pepe. Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of Contract Heroes. Today, joining us from Qcells North America is the contracts manager, John Rolland. Uh, we've got an exciting episode for you today, and it's going to be a case study that revolves around how John decided to choose and implement his CLM system of choice. Now, let's get into the episode. Well, John, thank you so much for joining us today. Before we flip things over to Pepe, I was hoping you could just give us a, a bit more understanding of your background as well as Qcells as an organization. Sure. So I've been in paralegal, uh, initially in the, uh... well, actually I've, I've had kind of a long journey.

0:54Started off as just a contract administrator in the technology space, and even before that, a little bit I was, you know, with, uh, with Chevron Texaco, for example, and companies that were outside the technology space, and then moved into the technology space with, uh, Broadcom, so semiconductor industry, and kind of worked my way up there from contract administrator to paralegal and then onward. And so Broadcom was the first place where I actually got involved helping build a contract management system from the ground up. In, uh, at Chevron Texaco and places that I'd worked prior to that, they really didn't have a real robust, you know, uh, contract management system. It was either completely manual, I mean, going back to the days of Chevron Texaco, we literally just had massive file rooms full of, you know, folders with all of our files, and you had to print everything and put them into the folder in the sequence that the contract revisions occurred, and all the email correspondence had to go in there. So I've actually been in this business long enough to see the actual transition from just hard copy contract management going into digital contract management, and then actually the evolution of sort of the contract management system space.

2:00Like, you know, when I was at Broadcom, there really wasn't hardly anybody doing this at all. There was maybe a couple companies doing contract management systems. You know, this is probably 15 years ago maybe at this point, and it was very, very expensive and it was very, very involved. And, uh, over subsequent companies that I've gone to, like I've also worked at Toshiba, and we had a contract management system there, each iteration, you know, it's been easier and it, you know, there, there's been more competition in the market. So again, at Broadcom, there's just only a couple of places to choose from. Toshiba there was more, and then, you know, it just, I've been, you know, various other companies kind of along the way. I was at Broadcom for, you know, uh, about 10 years, so, um, this might actually be a 20-year period rather than a, than just a 10-year period. But, uh, yeah, and so it's very interesting to see now, uh, I've gone through this a number of times with a number of different platforms and a number of different implementation processes and, and companies. So yeah, I've, I've been doing this for a little while now, and this was just the latest iteration working with Angel Loft and Co. That's great, John. And well, CLMs are not new now.

3:06Uh, you know, it's, they're been on the market for over a decade, or maybe two decades already. But the thing there is that a lot of the company think that it's just like buying a technology, it's just like a plug and play, but the thing is, like, a lot of people still don't know that there's a lot of work that you have to do before jumping into technology. So we are very excited to have you on the show so you can tell us about your experience because there's, first of all, like, how do you identify those needs? Well, as you said, there's a lot of different competitors right now on the market, like, how do you evaluate all the different vendors, the implementations and of course, how can you evaluate, you know, the impact of a new technology? So let's start with the beginning, right? Like, uh, what specific challenges did you see Qcells that you think you knew a CLM was, like, the right fit in order to, you know, fix those bottlenecks inside the operation? Yeah. Well, so Qcells was an interesting situation where they didn't have a contract management system at all.

4:11You know, so a lot of times you'll go to a company and they've got one that's serving a basic purpose, you know, and a basic function, but you know, they j- they want to expand into something, you know, that has more functionality and does more things for the company. This was a case where there literally was nothing in place, and so all the contracts were just being stored in SharePoint, you know, and so there was sort of like a folder structure that had been, you know, created in there, but they were still having challenges of which folder is it in, are the approval emails in the same folder or do they exist somewhere else, budget approvals exist somewhere else. And, and also, you know, you have things in SharePoint, it's very difficult to do any reporting functionality on, uh, metadata, you know, for example. So they were running multiple sort of manual Excel spreadsheets, uh, that were tracking, A, metadata of contracts, expiration dates, approval dates, you know, things like that. It was just very, um, very, a lot of manual work involved and, and a lot of places you had to go to get things.

5:08Like, so you'd have the, the spreadsheet that would give you s- you know, some of the minimal metadata, let's say, that had to be, of course, manually entered, but then ultimately you'd have to go into SharePoint and you'd actually have to find the document, you know, itself if you wanted any more detail. And so I think they just, they just reached a point where, you know, the company had reached a certain size and had reached a sort of critical mass of the number of contracts that they had that they just felt it was the time, time to do it. And John, was there a tipping point when the team realized this? And, and were you a- at the organization when they had made this decision or, or did you come on on board- I-... to help with the process? I think this is another one of those things where I think it had reached a tipping point, and they wanted to bring on a contracts manager anyway because we j- we had just had a setup where there really wasn't anybody in the, in the contracts manager role. It was just sort of attorneys and then contract admins, but there was no- nothing in the middle, you know, between those two, and so they wanted to bring somebody in. And I think they had on their mind at that point that they wanted to do a contract management system because- Uh, that's one of the strong parts of my resume, is just that I've, that I've done that at a, at a lot of places.

6:12And, like, immediately once I was hired, that was, like, the f- one of the first things I was tasked with, was doing a deep dive into this. And not j- uh, they... And this is a case where they did not have an idea of what system they wanted to go with, and so the first task was to basically survey the environment right now as far as contract management systems that are available, and just look at everything that was out there. And how did you go about, you know, narrowing your search and coming up with a list of finalists to, to really kinda do a deep dive with and- Yeah, it was tricky. I, I actually vetted 35 contract management systems, you know, uh, pretty, pretty thoroughly. And so I was looking at things like, you know, obviously one of the first things you gotta look at is price, you know, because, you know, our company didn't wanna spend a fortune, you know, on this. And so, uh, there were some systems... And, and then you just look at basically, okay, what workflows are... You know, you're trying to do two things. One is, what are we gonna use it for right now? And so we wanna make sure that it functions for exactly what our workflows are right now, and what kind of metadata we're tracking, and what type of reporting we know that we wanna do right now.

7:14But then there's also, we do wanna make sure, even if we don't pull the trigger on additional functionality now, either paying for it or building it, that it does have the ability to expand into areas that we can see ourselves going in a year or two or more. And so basically we were looking at those two factors. Okay, what does it do now and what can it be made to do if we wanna throw some more money at it and spend some more time in development, and all of that stuff. Or be trained, you know, to build it, uh, ourse- to build additional functionality ourselves. And so once you get into that, then you start really looking. So that eliminates some people right off the, right out the gate, because certain thing, certain platforms you just know won't do certain things. And so, like, o- one has a great approval workflow process, but it doesn't have the ability to email, uh, within the system and have the emails go into the contract record. Or it has the ability to send emails, but only internally to licensed users. It doesn't allow external users to, to reply to an email and have that be stored. So there's all kinds of, like, microscopic details like that that, that go into this. And then, then you just start looking at the interface too, and just seeing what you f- how you like the interface.

8:22There were a lot of them that on the surface seemed to work, but we just didn't like the, the interface was like, oh, that's ugly. Ooh, you know, like, we just, we don't wanna look at that. That's just, that's just, it, it, it just is not user-friendly at all. And, you know, we, you also look for simplicity of function, so I don't wanna have to click four things to do one function. I want, to the extent possible, one-click functions and, and things like that. So, you know, you just start narrowing things down and narrowing things down and, you know, finally we got down to, I wanna say, five top contenders. And then from there it just became a question really of price. Like, there were a couple... Th- there was at least one that was just completely out of our, our, our range for, for budget, like what we were willing to spend, but would've been a great program. Like, it was just, it was fantastic.

9:08You know, it was like the Rolls-Royce, and it was just, it was unfortunately just beyond what, what we could afford, or what, rather what we wanted to spend, you know, at that, that particular time. And so we were looking just for that sweet spot. What does everything that we want and for a reasonable price, and it's easy to build and easy for people to use, and it looks nice and, and all of this. So that's, that was the process. Yeah, that's great. And actually that was something that I was actually going to follow up with a question, but you already answered it, John. Because, you know, there's a lot of independent researchers such as, you know, Forrester, Gartner, where you can see, like, some of the leaders, so you can narrow those 35 vendor lists into probably those top five. Of course, price is one of the main items or requirements that is important for a company, flexibility. But let's move forward to the next, uh, phase of this CLM journey. Like, once you decided to go with Agiloft, like, can you tell us a little bit about your experience? Like, how was implementing Agiloft with Cohu team as your, as your consulting partners?

10:09And especially, like, which were, like, the main teams or internal, you know, like, the people that were involved during the implementation process? And for companies that are still in the phase one of the CLM journey, like, what would be your recommendations and your experience? Yeah. So I'll say of all the contract management implementations that I've done, Cohu was far and away the best, you know, uh, implementation process that we had. Everybody really knew what they were doing. When something was built it, it worked. It was done right the first time. And the other thing that was great about Cohu's approach was rather than having it be something where Qcells would say, "Here's what we want," and then Cohu would go off behind the scenes and do it, and then it would just magically appear, to the extent practical, Cohu would show us what they were doing. So we basically have the implementation part that you buy, and then you have a small amount of training, you know, at the end that you can use for, for specific teaching, for them to teach you, Cohu to teach Qcells how to do certain things, build certain things on our own, fix certain things on our own.

11:11What was great about Cohu's approach was during the build, you know, it was really interactive, and so there would be things where we'd say, "Well, we'd like it to do this," and they would show us how they did that, you know, while in real time. So and we would have the recordings of that so that, you know, by the time we even got to the training, we knew how to do a lot of the stuff. You know, we, like, if we wanted to change a workflow or we have a list of contract types, we wanted to add a new contract type. We have a list of departments, we wanna add a new department. How do we add new users, licensed users, and things like this? We knew how to do all of that before we even got to the training, so the training was able to be laser-focused on, you know, really specific things that we hadn't necessarily gone over in the build. So that was a real big difference. And, yeah, again, just the speed with which the Cohu team would fix things as well. Like, just you would say, "Hey, we've got a problem with this. You know, we're testing it and, you know, we have a problem with this."

12:04And Cohu would have it fixed sometimes just within minutes, you know, but always, you know- Within the same day, you know, and so it, it was, it was really great. Oh, and so to the other part of your question, yeah, the real critical part about, uh, making a, from our side, of making a transition be smooth also, and this is to the, the, to the extent that we ran out of time and got a little rushed at the end to, w- to a minor degree, was not Koho's fault at all. It was purely we, in a sense, had too many cooks in the kitchen a- on our side at times where, you know, you need to get the buy-in of all the department, not just all the departments that are gonna be using the Agiloft system or whatever the contract management system is. Uh, but you need to get all the people on a given team that are gonna be involved. And so, you know, in our case, we were lucky. We, we decided at least at this initial stage to go with a one-step legal only workflow. We don't have something where this is gonna also get kicked out to, say, the finance department to approve the budget and to the business team to approve the business terms.

13:04We decided to do all of that via email and then just have one workflow, which is just a one click. You assign it to the legal approver, the legal approver approves it, and then it's done. And so in, to that extent, you know, we, we involved all of the attorneys and just said, "What do you guys wanna see, you know, in this interface? What would be helpful to you?" And so w- we would show them, you know, uh, updates of the build and, like, make sure that they were okay with how it was looking and that we were only gonna have this workflow and what the functionality limitations were gonna be. And had we had a financial approval, you know, piece, we would've done the same with finance. And so I was gonna say, though, the thing that's important to do is, you know, so we had a situation where, you know, we had a couple people at a higher level on the legal team that needed to weigh in on some of these s- decisions, and not everybody was in every meeting, you know? And so you, you would have a situation where we would do a meeting and, uh, you know, one of us would communicate to, uh, Koho, "Okay, this is what we want."

13:59And so Koho would go off and build it, and a week later, you know, we'd be testing it, let's say. And then the person who wasn't in the meeting the previous time would be, "Oh, no, no, that's not what I wanted. You know, I w- I'd, I'd rather it do this." And so it's very critical that, you know, y- all of your key decision-makers are in the build ca- all of the build calls so that you're not, y- you're not changing stuff. So, like, the perfect situation is, you know, your company tells Koho what to build one t- Koho goes and builds it, you test it. Is you tell Koho to build something, Koho builds it, and someone goes, "Oh, I wanna add this to it," or, "I wanna change this," or, you know, "I wanna, I wanna do this to it." That eats up your time, you know? And so, you know, you can, uh, j- so that's really important is not just to have the key team me- members involved, but have them be involved fully, you know, at the build stage and not, you know, you've got a three-person team that's making decisions. Okay, pr- the first meeting is only two of those people, and then the three per- the third person weighs in a week later and asks for changes. You know, that's not how you wanna do it.

15:00You wanna have, give a clear definitive message to Koho at every stage. Yeah, and, and- That's all. That's what I see... and John, I, you know, we obviously, we appreciate the feedback and, and I, I think that you said something there that's, that's so important, right? And, and you do need to make sure that all of your, your stakeholders are involved early and often, right? And even in that discovery process so that when we do get to the build, hopefully all the information that both teams need to, to build and test, right? It's, it's all been discussed and, and I think that that's something that's super important. And I did wanna touch on, you know, I, I think some, some folks out there might be a little bit surprised to hear that budget was one of those things that came into play here and, and, you know, you still moved forward with Agiloft. And, you know, something that we say is, is that it really is the most bang for your buck that you can get out there on the marketplace. But I think to hear that, you know, from a customer, right, that it can be extremely cost effective, it can be something that is, is currently fairly simplistic for you, but also, you know, having that ability to grow and scale inside of a system and not having to reevaluate your CLM provider in a couple of years, you know, just how important that can be to an organization. Yeah, what's really important about that is that you have to have people on your team that really understand contract management systems to sort of know what you can get away with at a, on a very basic build of a system that's perhaps meant to be more complex.

16:14So there's versions of Agiloft that would've been much more expensive. So, like, if we'd wanted to have the, uh, artificial intelligence, you know, document review, if we'd wanted to have multiple workflows, I think maybe the price for Agiloft might have been around the same still, but the build cost would've been more. And so one of the things that, that we did was, you know, so for, for our build cost, for us to be able to build what we did, uh, for the cost of the build, you know, that, that we budgeted, we really had to know exactly what we wanted and be able to give clear direction to Koho because, you know, this was flip, let's just, I'll just throw out a number. Like, if you pay for a 40-hour build, you've gotta really know how to manage that time and, and ask for exactly what you want, be very, very specific. You can't get a 40-hour build and just be exploring what the possibilities of Agiloft could be and trying to build this, oh, I don't like that, let's try to build this instead.

17:11You've gotta be laser focused to make the most use of your time. And so that was something that we got the, a very, you know, budget-friendly version of, of Agiloft, but we bare- s- uh, like this will sat- that you'll know what I mean, I think, hopefully, is we barely got it in under budget, right? So it's like we basically used up every ounce of, of goodwill, you know, with Koho. You know, with they were basically within the budget of time that was allotted to us, but I think you guys kind of went over a little bit, you know, uh, but, you know, gave it to us in your good grace. And we just barely got through with the amount of training, uh, period hours that we were allotted. Uh, so it was very, very tight, in other words. And so if we didn't know what we were doing, we would not have succeeded. You know, it, it would've just been something where we didn't communicate this properly to Koho, and so we didn't get what we wanted or a lot of this is the other thing too, is a lot of companies will, um, come out of their contract management system, uh, experience or the builds experience going, "Oh, the implementer was terrible. They, we didn't get anything we wanted." And it's like, no, you didn't ask for that.

18:12You did-- We gi- they gave you exactly what you asked for, you just didn't know that what you asked for was wrong, you know, and, and was not going to work, you know? And so that's the other thing I guess I would say to this, too, just to avoid acrimonious situations in the future, is to document everything you're asking your implementer for. When it's, it appears, you know, three months after your build has been made that something's not working, you can go back to your list and go, "Oh yeah, we didn't ask for that." You know, you know, there's nowhere in here where we said that the email function had to do this. And so before you get mad at, you know, Agiloft or get mad at, you know, your implementer, just realize that's not on the list of things you asked for it to do. And in fact, the thing that you asked, the functionality that you asked for, you can see on your tracker spreadsheet, you know, the, of the action items that you were, that you, and the functionality items that you were looking at. This is nowhere on here, and in fact, what we asked for is exactly how the system is functioning.

19:04So you just need to make real-- be really clear, like when you're building an email functionality, what exactly do you want it to do? And then when you're building a workflow where that's gonna go to one person and it's not gonna be easily... This workflow, you can't just go in and tweak it and make it be now for five people. It's a one-person workflow. It's not a tweakable workflow. And so just be really aware of exactly what you've, what you asked for in your build because that's the thing, mo- uh, the further you get away, you'll, at least this is the case with Q-Cells, you know, we built some functionality that we, we don't, didn't necessarily use right away, you know. And so, but we knew we were gonna use it fairly soon, and then three months later after the build, you know, you're, you're kind of like, "Oh, I don't think this is working the way we wanted." And so it's very important to remember what, what your initial intent and ask actually was. And I think that's the correct approach, John, right? It's like dividing, you know, the big implementation into, into different phases so you can understand what can you do with a super flexible platform like Agiloft, right?

20:04Because when you start using it and you can see, like, what can you do with it, then you will be able to be more specifics on your requirements for a second phase, right? And that's also not just for the implementation-wise, but also for the adoption. Because people inside the company already know, like, what can they do. They already feel confident on, on what they can, how they can operate the system, and they can still, still thinking about, like, what else can you do with a program like Agiloft. So I think actually that that's, like, the correct approach on how to do a CLM implementation. And one other thing is, like, contract management is an ongoing work, right? This is not, like, set in stone. This is something that can evolve, and you can always see new bottlenecks. You can always be more efficient in having a system that is flexible.

20:57You can always find a way on how to become more productive on what you already implemented there. Yeah, that was exactly how we approached it, too, is, you know, we just wanted to get sort of our foot in the pool with a contract management system, but not necessarily right out the gate have it be doing everything that it could possibly be doing for the company. Like, so for example, we launched with a basic one-step workflow, certain set of contract types, contract, you know, d- uh, departments, things like that, certain number of users. Uh, but we didn't even really get into reporting, and so just because we didn't think that reporting would be something we would be using in the immediate future. And so that is one of the, the things now that we're working on is, okay, well, we don't know how to do really how to create custom reports, and we don't have any training left, say, with Koho. So it's like, okay, do we now go back and just buy a little bit of extra time with Koho to get trained on reporting, or do we do...

21:51Uh, Koho provided us and Agiloft provided us with tons of, uh, materials, you know, training materials as well. So do we just have to dig deeper into the, the training materials like Agiloft University and things like this, figure out how to do this? So yeah, it's an ongoing thing that... And we wanna build, we want, we, we knew that eventually we would wanna build, uh, out the matter management module, but not at the time, not at the initial time that we worked with Koho. So we sort of kept matter management completely off the table for, for this implementation, knowing that at some point, you know, we will go back and do that. And so again, that'll either be something that if the training materials allow us to do it ourselves, we'll do that, or we'll engage Koho again and just say, "We just need to get a, I don't know, five hours to get to learn how to do, uh, matter management." You know, and like maybe matter management and reporting, something like that. We need a deep dive into that, uh, training material, of training sessions, you know, so that we can do that. So yeah, it's an o- totally ongoing process, and, uh, we would probably do the same thing maybe, like, if we wanted to build some additional workflows.

22:49So there's, you know, there's two ways you can approach it, is you can either, you know, now that you have the basic knowledge, you know, from working with Koho of how to do things, you could just try to do it on your own and, like, lean into the, the training materials and all of that. Or you could just, you know, say, "Okay, I'm just gonna get a couple hours of training, you know, on a very specific topic with Koho, and then I, then I'll build it myself," all the way to you could just engage Koho again, you know, to just, "Hey, I don't even wanna deal with the matter management. I'm too busy with other stuff. Can... What would it cost to just build, to do exactly what we did with contract management module to really build out the matter management module? Like, what would that cost?" You know, and because I, I believe it's included in... Like, so this is the thing about Agiloft too, is a lot of stuff is included in Agiloft in your license that's not necessarily included in your build. And so you have a license that, like, allows you to use the, the matter management module, but your build, if you're going budget conscious like we did, your build only includes the build of the contract management system module.

23:48And so Agiloft has a lot more value in there depending on how much you wanna spend on your build. So that's the thing. It can be budget friendly from a license standpoint, and then you can spread your budget allocation to the builds out over numerous years. Like year one, you're gonna build contract management. Year two, you're gonna build matter management. Year three, you may build something else. Yeah, so yeah, there's a lot of flexibility with it. Yeah, yeah, and that's, you know, something we always touch on, John, right, is, is taking that phased approach, especially if the organiza- if you are, you know, a smaller mid-size organization and, and budget is one of those things that, you know, is going to play a large factor in this process. But, but John, it, this has been a, a fantastic conversation. We really appreciate you You know, jumping on and chatting with us about your experience with both Agiloft and Koho. I guess, you know, one final question to wrap up. If you could share one bit of information, whether it be around this implementation, a past implementation that you've done, just one tip for folks that are out there that are searching for the CLM for their organization, uh, what would that be? Yeah, I would say definitely make sure you get a good implementer. You know, that's critical, and, you know, so if we're already talking about Koho, just go with Koho. Don't think about it. It's just, just go with Koho.

24:53I've worked with a lot of implementers. There, there's just, there's no competition, uh, that Koho's by far the best. And also just yet really, really put together the necessary people internally. Do your research first. Really think about what you want to build and, you know, then of course, you know, work with Agiloft. You know, like the step- step- steps will typ- typically be that you, you talk to Agiloft or your contract management system, uh, provider first, give them an idea of exactly what you wanna do, and then they'll give you a rough estimate of, of what the build will cost. And then you can cut back things that you don't think you'll need, or if it's cheaper than you thought, you can add things. But the really, the most critical thing is to have the buy-in of the decision-makers at your company, the people that are going to use it because the, the, the thing that's gonna run you over budget more than anything else and cause problems is changes, constant changes in the build process. You really need to, to find a way to have all the key players and decision-makers involved, uh, at the critical stages so that when you're talking to Koho or your implementer, you're giving them very precise non-changing information that you're gonna be able to live with after the build is, is completed.

26:01The thing that will kill your project, well, other than a bad implementer, the thing that will kill your project from your side is telling them to build something, they build it, you don't like it, they change it, you just still don't like it, you change it again. Now you wanna go back to the original thing that you had, and then that just kind of snowballs through the entire build process and, and you just lose critical time because Koho is gonna budget a certain amount of time, assuming things go fairly smoothly, to get to your A from A to Z. And if you keep reiterating A over and over and over again and just take up too much time in A, you're gonna really feel cramped by the time you get to, to, to the later stages. And so you're not gonna have as much time to really think things through because you're gonna be very rushed at the end, or you're gonna go over budget, uh, because you'll have burned through your allotted, uh, build time, and you're only halfway there. So that's the most critical thing is really do what it, what needs to be done to do your homework ahead of time and know exactly what you want, know that the interface looks like how you want it to look so that you don't, they don't build y- Koho doesn't build you a page based on your specifications and then you have all kinds of issues with you don't like it.

27:11You know, and especially you don't wanna have a thing where that initial decision-maker set is great, but then you, like for example, roll it out to your attorneys who are gonna be the ones who are gonna be using the approval workflow function, and this is done way late in the game and they say, "Oh, I don't like this at all. I need this, and I need this, and I need this field, and I need this piece of information, and I don't like the email functionality." And then you have to go back and reiterate not just A, but like A through L in your build phase. That's gonna be a disaster. So that would be the number one thing I would do. Great. No, I, I think that's so important, right? I mean, change management, making sure everybody's on the same page, and the readiness work, right? That upfront work, the homework, whatever you wanna call it. I, I think if you are able to do those things upfront, uh, it's really gonna set yourself up for success, uh, no matter who you work with on the project. But John, we really appreciate you joining us. Thanks so much. My pleasure. And thanks everybody. It was great talking with you. And, uh, and thanks everybody for listening to another episode of Contract Heroes.

28:08This episode of the Contract Heroes is sponsored by Koho Consulting. Koho helps organizations of all shapes and sizes find, implement, and manage their chosen CLM tool. Whether your project is buy or sell side led, Koho can help you navigate the waters of the CLM space to make sure that you're getting a product that's going to fit like a glove years to come. If you'd like to learn more about Koho, visit their website at C-O-H-O consulting dot com.