The Impact of CLM On Procurement With Prashant Dubey

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. Uh, today we've got a very exciting episode for you. Prashant Dubey, uh, he's from Elevate, and he is the vice president of contract solutions and disability inclusion over there. And, and before I flip things over to Pepe, uh, to give us a better understanding of what we're gonna be chatting about today, um, I want to, uh, introduce Prashant and, and have him give a little bit of, uh, information on his background and also what that title is all about. Yeah. Marc, thank you very much, and hello, Pepe. Good morning, you guys. Thank you very much for having me on this, uh, podcast. And by the way, um, I wanted to thank you not just for inviting me, but I want to thank you guys for actually doing the Contract Hero series. It's, it represents the best of collaboration in our industry.

1:00You're, you guys are pretty egalitarian in terms of getting people involved, and realize that knowledge comes from many different places. And even if there's commercial competition with a particular company, you're, you're basically, uh, not deterred by that. You have people as part of one community, and I'm encouraged. I hope that our entire community can do more of what you guys are doing, so thank you for that. I, I don't- Yeah... say that gratuitously. I mean it in genuine- Well, thank you. We appreciate that as well. Yeah, absolutely. So, uh, thank you again for inviting me. Yeah, in terms of, uh, background, it's pretty varied. I spent the first 10 years of my career in healthcare. I started off as a strategy consultant in a joint venture between Bain and Baxter Healthcare Corporation. I worked for Baxter in Chicago for about a decade. Uh, and then I moved out to the West Coast and completely switched industri- industries. In the late '90s, it was sort of the beginning of what we call the Silicon Forest in Portland, Oregon, and the internet companies were really kicking in.

1:55I knew nothing about software companies at the time, but I started working for software companies and ended up having a good run. Worked for about three or four companies, management, accounting, startup, uh, IT portfolio management, information security. And I was in at the early stages and helped build and grow those companies, and they all had successful exits, which was, uh, I think very fortunate. Had nothing to do with me being a great stage, just right place, right time, surrounded by great teams. Um, in the early 2000s, I stumbled upon the legal industry when, um, I was helping a friend of mine raise a C round for an e-discovery company called Phios. It was one of the leaders in e-discovery back in the day. It was Phios, Kroll Applied Discovery, EED, companies like that, if you remember the early days of e- e-discovery. Um, so I, I was there for about six years, and we grew that company, and we sold it to Excuse me. A company called DTI, uh, which is a big consolidator in the industry. And then, uh, in the, uh, late 2000s, I started my own company called Symity, and it was focused on contract management.

3:01And really, the reason I did that is because it was the polar opposite of e-discovery. E-discovery is what I call an unwilling customer in an unwilling market. Uh, no one wants to get sued, and when they get sued, they'd really rather not go through discovery. Contract management is completely the opposite, right? I mean, everybody does it all day, every day. It's something desirable 'cause you do it to conduct commerce with customers and hire vendors and partners, et cetera. So it was also more continuous. It wasn't episodic, so everybody was a potential target. So I had the good fortune of setting up a company called Symity, uh, which by the way means pure intent in Sanskrit, and, uh, did that with a bunch of friends and colleagues, and we grew that company, and Elevate acquired us in 2018. And so we merged the business together, and, uh, after doing the post-merger integration, um, our CEO and COO, Liam Brown and, um, Steve Harmon, were very gracious in entertaining a role that I proposed, which was a combination of being a subject matter expert in contract management, as well as focusing on making an impact in the industry in the area of disability inclusion.

4:08So that's my dual title, where I'm focused on, uh, helping customers with solving contract management challenges using the capabilities of Elevate, but I'm also focused on advocating for the inclusion of people with disabilities, uh, within the legal industry, which has a long way to go when it comes to race, gender, and social justice, but disability inclusion is even further, uh, back and needs to be focused on. So thank you for asking about that. I'm very passionate about it. I thank, uh, Liam and Steve for giving me the support to do this role. That's amazing, Prashant, and I think that, well, again, thanks a lot for your kind words about the podcast. I think the, one of the best ways to learn and to increase our knowledge on specific topics is to ask the experts. You won't, you don't need to have everything in a book or everything. I think the best way is just to ask the people who have al- already, um, well, experience, or at least more than us on these subjects.

5:07And I think that, uh, well, you already touched on some of the things that we would like to focus on this episode, which is how to make the contract management process more efficient, right? And you, a- and you said it right. This is something that every company has, right? That there's, every company needs contracts because it's, those are, like, the manuals of commercial relationships, which is the, um, the kind of economic activities that brings value to a company, right? Either if you're on the buying side or in the selling side, you're always working with external companies, and the contracts are the manuals on how you can handle those. So, uh, Prashant, I would like to, uh, kick off this interview by asking, like, what kind of recommendations can you give for a procurement pr- professional looking to start their search for, for a CLM tool? Yeah, and, uh, by the way, I would recharacterize this. I don't think it's an interview because you guys have a lot of knowledge to add as well.

6:02Now let's make this a dialogue because I think we can collectively Add to the conversation. You know, it's interesting, Pepe, that you bring up, uh, procurement. Uh, procurement is, um, I think sort of a hotbed of contract management opportunity, and everybody realizes it. I mean, just like a law department, we talk about the need for focusing on fluid processes for contracting so that we can enable lawyers to practice more law. Similarly in procurement, help- helping procurement professionals making, uh, uh, some, having some efficiency gains when it comes to contracting will allow them to be better category managers. I mean, their goal is to manage categories of, uh, suppliers and be able to optimize their spend, and that's how they're measured. The contract is really a technicality to codify the relationship with the other side. So there's a tremendous amount of organizational benefit in focusing on buy side indirect procurement contracting, and we're seeing a tremendous amount of, uh, momentum in that area.

7:04And actually, interestingly, a lot of the momentum is coming from procurement organizations proactively driving it. So in the past, you might have seen the law department driving it because they're saying, "Listen, our lawyers are spending so much time reviewing these business as usual commercial agreements, and we need them to focus on more strategic items." But we're seeing the procurement organization actually funding, uh, contract management business processes, not just to acquire software, but also to go beyond that and put in place organized processes for intake, triage, uh, review and negotiation using playbooks, standardizing and harmonizing templates. All of the things that we talk about with law, law departments are now happening with procurement. So, um, I think one of the key things that I think we should focus on when it comes to this is recognizing that, um... And this is gonna, I'm gonna say, state this as hyperbole for effect, but the procurement organization has viewed legal as a deal prevention department, and the law department has viewed procurement as fast and loose, and neither of those extremes are true, but the truth lies somewhere in the middle, right?

8:16And that relationship is really important to understand that there's oftentimes some tension there. And what, uh, what a CLM system and a process does is allow that tension to be processized so that there's more management controls and less emotion in the process, if that makes any sense. Yeah, I, I think it definitely does. And I think, you know, it, it's interesting that, um, maybe the space in general, I think as it matures, we're, we're really starting to see different parts of organizations finally start to see the value in contract management. Whether that be that, um, an organization has already implemented, um, so maybe some better processes and a CLM tool inside of the legal department, and then other parts of the organization start to see the value. Or, uh, we're even seeing that, uh, the procurement department is actually leading these searches, a- and the, the legal team and even the sales team are, are kind of an afterthought. They're really looking at focusing on their, their buy side because they understand that that's where, in their organization, where most of the issues are, are coming up.

9:17And, and Prashant, I'm just curious, I mean, are, are you seeing that, that more organizations without anything in place, um, that procurement is leading, leading the charge? Or is it more so that, A, they have a CLM tool implemented, maybe they have some type of contract management tool, it doesn't even have to be a full CLM tool, but inside of the legal department, and then other parts of the organization, mainly procurement, are, are seeing the benefits and now they want to, to go out there and either search for a tool or try to implement another phase of, uh, the application that legal is using? Uh, I mean, that's a fascinating question. You know, I, I certainly don't have visibility to the entire market to be able to give you a statistically significant answer, but I can give you some anecdotal information that I've seen talking to customers. It's a little bit of both. I would probably say it's more of the former. In other words, there may not be a CLM initiative in the law department, but, uh, a lot of procurement organizations use purchase-based systems, and these systems oftentimes have contract management modules.

10:17And, you know, just like any best of breed integrated system, contract management functionality is relatively limited compared to a lot of specialized CLM systems we see in the market these days. And so they may start using it initially as a repository or maybe to run RFPs, uh, with, uh, the counterparty, uh, and facilitate the process and store information around, you know, the vendor master and being able to get NDAs in place. But really, contract management workflow is pretty rigid in a lot of these systems. So that causes them to, uh, look for a system that's more full-featured rather than just use the CLM modules of their system that they have in place. So when you think about some of these systems, um, they're structured in a fashion that there are certain categories of contracts that can be dealt with in a very specific workflow. Even things like repositories, for example, don't have flexibility to store parent-child hierarchies.

11:16So you can't get a main or a master services agreement and all the child agreements together in one place. Sounds tactical, but it's really important to manage obligations when you have a contract in place. And so that kind of functionality resides in specialized CLM systems and doesn't reside in the CLM modules of these systems. So that drives procurement to go beyond it, almost for self-preservation. Right. And I think that, um, maybe at the beginning, most of the, let's say, champions or the main stakeholders of a company looking for a CLM is, of course, the legal de- department, right? Because they're the ones managing all their contracts. But once you're getting deep inside the implementation process, the real beneficiaries are the commercial departments, because they're the ones who need to close the deal. They're the ones who needs to monitor the obligations or the tasks that they have been, uh, bound for, uh, for all of their, for all of their contracts.

12:18And one, uh, well, some of the key functionalities that you just said, it just like this, uh, parent relationship with all the different agreements, especially whe- when you're talking about, uh, big companies, right? That they have an MSA with the holding companies, and then they have subcontracts with the different regions. They need to know what they're agreeing on, on every MSA. Uh, the RFPs, that's, that's an- an- another process. And I think there's a lot of, uh, a- a- a lot of key features that can ex- be expanded, not only for a contract repository, because, I mean, that's still one of the main pain points, right? Because nobody knows where is the contract. They're looking for the last version of the contract. Uh, they're working with different versions of Microsoft Word. Who has the most up- updated version during the, the, the negotiation process, right? That's something that I think a lot of the, not just procurement, but other departments ha- uh, have that pain there. And, um, uh, in- in- in your experience also, uh, Prashant, like, what would you say, what are other key functionalities that, uh, these type of departments are looking for when they're, uh, looking for, uh, for CLM?

13:27Yeah, I mean, that's, um, a great segue into also, I think, emphasizing that if the law department does drive an initiative, uh, more and more you're seeing that general counsel and their teams are not just law department centric. In other words, they're not just looking at the legal workflow, right? They understand that their part in the process is part of a larger contract management business process that goes across administrative boundaries, right? Where you have, uh, commercial agreements with customers, sales is involved, uh, on the vendor side. You have procurement involved, but you may also have data privacy, cybersecurity, and all these other groups involved. So, uh, the law department is looking beyond themselves. But I would say when procurement is looking at this, we've seen a growing trend that they're looking beyond procurement needs. They're actually setting up things that they're calling global contracting centers of excellence. So they're focusing on the capability side of a system, but also the content side.

14:28So they're looking, on the content side, they're looking at how do we standardize and harmonize our contract templates? We might have 100, and we know we can get them down to 30, right? Instead of having so many duplicate templates. How do we create playbooks in place that represent our actual points of view on different provisions, so that when a third-party contract comes in, we can review it and know, number one, where does that language deviate from our preferred positions? And number two, um, where is there language missing that we know absolutely needs to exist, right? And those playbooks are something that typically a law department would drive in order to allow things like self-serve contracting, to be able to push contracting out from the law department and say, "If you follow this playbook, people outside of the law department, you can take these three alternate provisions, these fallback positions, uh, provisions, by the way, and use those in this descending order of risk. When you go beyond that, pull the rip cord and call us. Beyond that, you, uh, before that, you can actually do it yourself." We're finding that pro- procurement organizations are focusing on that, which drives them to look at functionality and CLM systems that can take multiple templates, have decision trees to know based on an intake protocol, which template should you select.

15:47And the system can automatically tee that up when somebody fills out a proper intake, uh, form. Um, they're looking at how does that go into a workflow where you can a- uh, apply a playbook to it and different provisions and be able to automatically identify deviations, so you can properly redline agreements. Um, and that functionality, I think, exists, and a lot of AI is being brought into it now in CLM systems, so you can do that , excuse me, in a more automated fashion and, uh, and allow people to do, uh, faster review, which accelerates cycle time. So their requirements for functionality go beyond repository to what's the workflow? How do you get multiple groups involved? How do you have an approval workflow that can go to multiple departments and have their point of view infused into things like playbooks, approval thresholds, et cetera.

16:42These aren't things that a procurement organization was necessarily thinking about before. They're really thinking about it very procurement centric. Now they're saying, "How do we get this deal done faster and get multiple stakeholders involved, and how can the system facilitate it such that legal has a high degree of confidence that we'll get them involved at the right time?" So I hope that makes sense. It does translate to functionality of a particular system, and we're seeing a lot of CLM software companies trying to build that in to ensure that they can have procurement centric functionality, which is slightly different than just law department centric functionality, if that makes any sense. Yeah, I, I think it does. And I think as the, the maturity of organizations continues to grow, I, I think, like you said, other parts of, of these organizations are starting to see the benefits of, of template harmonization and having clause libraries so that, um, they, they can be more self-service, and not everything has to flow through legal because we, we know and we see when we work with these organizations that, uh, it- it's a bottleneck. It slows people down, and, and legal shouldn't be focusing on, you know, most of the contracts that an organization are working with.

17:49They need to be focused on the ten or, or twenty percent of contracts that, um, that they need to be involved with, that, that were, that are more advanced, more robust, and, and there's a lot more work for them to do. Um, and, and it's work that only they can do, instead of doing work that, you know, other parts and, and departments can actually, um, take over because we've put in these policies and procedures and, and software- Uh, to allow them to, to leverage and, and do their own self thinking, uh, without adding risk to the organization because they have everything laid out for them. I mean, that's exactly right, Marc, because I mean, we've found that in 75% or 80% of the cases that business as usual contracts in the buy side end up having the same seven to 10 provisions negotiated every time, and they end up, uh, at the same ending point. So if that's the case and you can do proper deviation analysis using these CLM systems, you can work that ending point language into your starting point template, which lo and behold reduces your negotiation intensity.

18:49You might not have to negotiate those provisions in the first place if you start with the language you end at, and you, that's an acceptable risk, risk threshold to you, which actually accelerates your cycle time. And that also allows the law department to have their lawyers focus on bespoke agreements, which might be, you know, higher business risk for the organization, for example, or more mission critical vendors, for example. And lawyers getting involved earlier in a discussion with a vendor is much more strategic. So they're not just... The commercial terms aren't negotiated, and then they say, "Hey, do a legal review." Right? They can be involved in both because there's a interdependence between commercial terms and legal terms, and if the lawyer's involved early on and has the bandwidth to do that, it actually creates a higher quality deal for the vendor as well as the company itself. Right. And that was part of the next question that I wanted to do, which is like, how the CLM system will allow you to negotiate better deals, and this is exactly right.

19:50Maybe this is not something that might come from a CLM tool, but something that needs to be worked between the different departments because either if you're in the buying side or in the selling side, you know that those provisions are the ones that are always being negotiated, right? Yeah. You gotta be al- also, um, uh, you, you gotta... You have to sit the commercial teams and the legal teams on the same table to talk about their templates, right? I, I think that's one of, uh, we have another guest, uh, Tom Fuse, who called this the phase zero, which is just like, before going forward, we have to work on this, not only on the processes, that's okay, you need the processes, how you do the intake first and, and, and so, but also working on your templates so you can start working on playbooks. So when you have this provision and the, and the counterparty wants to negotiate because they don't, they don't agree with things like, uh, limitation of risk, of liabilities or, you know, like these clauses are always neg- negotiated, how you can, um, how, how, how you can teach the commercial teams who doesn't need to be a lawyer on how to negotiate those provision, having a playbook, and then close the deal way faster and don- and not always having to knock the door of the legal departments every time they need to neg- neg- negotiate any kind of provision.

21:13Yeah, I mean, uh, you bring up a really good point there, and I think it's also key to emphasize here that none of these CLM systems are trying to replace legal judgment. Yeah. And I don't think it's possible for them to. But I think what's happening with this functionality is that it's giving, it's providing two things to lawyers as well as professionals that are working in a legal workflow like procurement, greater visibility and greater management control, right? So the visibility to what are the existing relationships, visibility to what are the provisions that are most negotiated, visibility to the dev- deviation of those provisions from the st- starting point, so that they can be evaluated within risk thresholds, providing alternatives so that a company can say, a individual can say, "I have alternatives that are blessed or fallback provisions that are blessed by the law department, and I can insert these with confidence knowing that I'm not putting the company at any kind of legal risk." Right? That doesn't take away individual judg- judgment. All it does is facilitate individuals to use their judgment in a more rational way with actual data and analysis backing it up.

22:25So it gives everybody a high deg- high degree of confidence. So I think that that's really important because, for example, we've seen there are some tools out there which automatically will redline a provision. Well, I've talked to a number of lawyers that are not comfortable with that. What they wanna do is say, "I will identify..." And, and, and I'm sorry, redline provision, but insert, uh, alternate language, fallback language, right? The first part is great. Redline this provision and outline where it deviates from the starting point or our standard. But don't automatically insert a provision. Give me the option to insert that provision once you tell me that there's a deviation, right? And so some tools have gone too far and tried to replace that lawyerly judgment, and that I think is something that, uh, I, I, I, I think probably won't work in the industry long term. But having a system with functionality to be able to present options to people to say, "This is something that you've negotiated five, seven, 15 times in the past, and we can empirically tell you that this language is something that's accepted by the counterparty," gives everybody, including lawyers, a higher degree of confidence to just click and insert.

23:39Right? So I think that there's an efficiency to it, which also reduces organizational risk and greater visibility and greater management control and functionality are the things that drive this dynamic. Yeah. Yeah. A- and I think, I know, I mean, obviously we've touched on a, a lot of, of key things here around, um, what types of processes you should have in place and functionality that these teams are looking for and, and, um, a- and the maturity that most organizations are at now. And, and like, you know, I think what we've all seen over the past, you know, three to five years is, is that, um, not only is the industry maturing, but also the companies that are out there searching for these solutions are also maturing. Um, so- You know, with, with all that we've talked about, Prashant, I, I wanted to, to kind of switch gears a little bit here and, and wrap things up with, um, maybe some talk about the implementation process, and what, what are some key things that organizations need to look for? Um, you know, let's say that they have found a solution that they believe is going to be a great fit for their organization. They're excited.

24:46They wanna move forward. Um, as far as implementation goes, you know, what, what should they look for in an implementation partner? Um, uh, what are the first steps of, of that process? I think this is a really important question because despite everything we've talked about, to a certain extent, we may have collectively painted a little bit of a utopian vision, right? Everything that we've talked about is something that a highly evolved organization will actually focus on, in deviation analysis, figuring out how to use data and metrics to bring them back into templates and, and and basically adapt templates based on the information that exists, right? The, the, the truth is that most organizations, when implementing CL- CRM systems, are still starting with putting in place single source of truth repository. Excuse me. A single source of truth repository.

25:59So, uh, you know, looking at an implementation partner, somebody that understands that there's an organizational readiness that needs to be assessed. You can't go too fast. An implementation partner that understands that an iterative process is better than big bang. You can't come in there and ha- and configure seven, 10 different workflows and just roll them out mechanically, even if you go through user acceptance testing and all the technical aspects of it, because there's a big change management process, right? I mean, this is actually human beings doing work differently, and the truth is that even if the CLM system has great promise in terms of efficiency, it represents a change to how humans work. And even though everybody's queue is super long, lawyer's queue is long, procurement professional's queue is long, they know how to get their work done and go home in the evening to their families, right? They've figured it out. E- even using stone tablets and chisels, they've figured it out. So if you say this is a beautiful system, but it's a change, it's gonna take them more time.

27:02So it has to be-- an implementation partner has to recognize the soft aspects of the change management dynamics, not just the technical aspects of configuring a system, and understanding that most organizations are still wrangling with putting in place a single source of truth contract repository. If you can do that as a foundational element out of the gate, configure the repository with metadata, make sure legacy contract's getting there. There's a system for new contracts to get in there with metadata. You've probably gone 70% of the way in the early stages of implementation to increase organizational confidence so that they'll continue on. And then configure workflows such as NDAs, which I think a lot of organizations feel take up a lot of time that can be done in a self-serve manner. I mean, none of this is rocket science, but I wanna emphasize that the industry is still very nascent. Most organizations are at the point-- I mean, it's amazing.

28:02A decade plus after starting a company focusing on creating single source of truth repositories, 95% of companies I speak with today still don't have one in place. It's, it's it's amazing because it's a hard problem, right? I mean, there's tens of thousands of agreements. You sort of spend three to four weeks or three months negotiating a complex contract, breathe a sigh of relief, but then you store it on some shared drive and name it whatever makes sense to you personally, right? You don't go through the process of closing it out, sending it to a team that can extract metadata, putting it into a hierarchy, and making that available for subsequent analysis down the line. It's just an administrative detail people don't focus on. You add that to all the M&A happening, you're acquiring all these agreements from other companies. Where are you putting them? Well, you're just storing them on a shared drive until you can deal with them later, right?

28:55So I mean, an implementation partner that understands that it needs-- you need to start slow and go in progressive phases and be iterative rather than big bang and focus on the soft as well as the hard aspects of technical configuration is somebody that I think has the right characteristics. And, you know, I think you guys have a pretty high EQ from everything I've seen, so I'm sure when you work with your customers, you probably take all that into account, and I think that's really important. Well, thank you. Yeah. Thanks, Prashant. And I think that that's definitely something that we've, we've learned over, you know, the span of, of, uh, getting into this industry and, and being in it now for, for the past couple of years is, um, it, it is a little bit different and, and it's not that you're replacing a solution that people are already familiar with. You're, you're replacing processes that companies have done, like you said, for dozens of years.

29:50And, and it's definitely, um, it's a change and, and there needs to be change management involved or, you know, it-- the, the project probably has a high likelihood of failing because you are just not going to get the user adoption that, that you require. Um, and, and I think something else that we've learned more recently and, and as we continue to work with larger and larger organizations is that you truly need to do a, an extremely deep dive when you start these projects to get a full understanding of not only what, um, a customer wants in the immediate future, but also what they want down the road, so that you can im- implement a product that they'll have success with now- But they also won't run into issues as they continue to expand and look at other parts of the organization to, to add onto these processes. Um, and, and I think that that has, has really helped us out, um, a ton when we look at these, these phased approaches. I think that's right, Marc. And the other benefit of it is taking this phased approach is very consistent with how organizations budget for these things, right? I mean, they don't wanna expend capital all at once.

30:53You actually want executives to have proof points to say, "Okay, we believe there's an ROI here, and we see a proof of concept implemented here. There's a lot of organizational benefit. We can go get additional funding to expand it," right? It's very difficult to go in and say, "Let's get $10 million out of the gate and have a five-year implementation roadmap," and, and everyone's gonna fund it out of the gate. Doesn't work that way. So this approach is also very consistent with how these projects get funded, and I'm sure you've seen that too. Right. And there's a lot of importance on the post-implementation part, right, on the user adoption. Because I think one thing is to have all the main stakeholders through the implementation process so they can get, um, used to the, to the, to, to the system, how it works. Because at the end, it, it's a new tool that they're going to be using on their daily, uh, working life at least, right?

31:46So, uh, during the post-implementation process, it's like how you can help them to make the other end users to know, uh... First of all, understand why this will be on, on their benefit because most of the time people are very busy and they don't like to learn again a- another tool. They, they have to know what's going to be their main benefit and why they have to use it. And second of all, help them train them, right? Help have the main stakeholders because you, you want them to be selfs, um, uh, self-sufficient, i- if you wanna call it that way. So in, in case that there's somebody inside, like an end user wanna have any, any question with their, their system, they have people inside the organization who ha- who can help them to understand how it works, what they click that is, that, that was wrong and, and, and, and why the, the workflow didn't, didn't launch. So I think that's, that's a lot of, of the work and how you need to, uh, be, uh, uh, to be, you know, like to un- u- understand what they are their expectations and how you can help them to achieve their, uh, re- re- return o- of investment at least, right? Well, well, Pepe, I'm glad you brought that up.

33:07And, you know, one point, I know we're getting close to the end of our time, but, uh, we've seen on the user adoption side that it's important to differentiate between user support that's delivered by the software company, which says, "Hey, I'll, I can help you if your software isn't functioning the way it's supposed to." But what they won't know is how it's been configured for their particular workflow. An implementation partner needs to provide not just initial hyper-care after launch, but some kind of user support function to say if somebody calls in in the early days especially, right? Help them walk through the actual workflow. Here's where you click, here's what you do, and actually how is it configured for your business needs. Creating little videos and snippets to help them do some self-learning on their own, but also a little white glove service, honestly, to be able to have, you know, them have a high degree of comfort that they can call somebody. I mean, it sounds like a very manual process for this day and age, but everything isn't done through chatbots.

34:08This kind of thing requires some high-touch human support, and we've seen a lot of success in providing that ongoing managed service to companies. And hopefully you guys have seen the same. Yeah, Prashant, it's, it's- Right. Just like taking care of- Sorry, Pepe. Go ahead. Go ahead, Pepe... it, it, it just, it, it just like taking care of your customer that, that you know that once the implementation have gone live, that you have somebody who is gonna help you to answer, uh, questions such as how this works or things so basics, but we're still looking at it like, "Don't use Internet Explorer. Use Edge or Chrome." Yeah. Internet Explorer is not is not useful anymore. You know, like these kind of things that still with people who are not, uh, tech, um, you know, uh- Savvy... who, who weren't... Savvy, exactly. That, that was the term that I was looking for. Who are not tech-savvy, just, like, help them, right?

35:04It's just, like, this kind of personal, uh, touch that can make all your end users and to, uh, to make the adoption of the new software, uh, smoother, you know? Mm-hmm. Yeah. And, and I was gonna say, you know, it, it's something that we have rolled out here recently and, and we are offering to our customers now. And, and it's included in the initial year of the implementation because we, we understand how important, you know, making sure that user adoption is high and, and that they have a place to come with their either, most of the time it's non-technical questions, and it's end user question. Um, a- and that's definitely something that, that we have seen and, and our, our customers are very excited and happy that it is something that we're, we're offering now. So, um, I think we're, we're on the same, same page, Prashant. And, and hey, I, I know we, uh, we, we've been talking for a while. We could probably talk about these topics forever, but I think we're gonna go ahead and wrap it up here. So Prashant, thanks for joining us.

35:57Uh, if anybody wants to, to connect with you to, to continue this conversation, to learn more about the services that Elevate offers, uh, where's the best place to do that? Uh, they can email me at prashant.dubey@elevateservices.com. It's P-R-A-S-H-A-N-T.D-U-B-E-Y@elevateservices.com. You can connect with me on LinkedIn as well. Uh, those are a couple of ways to get in touch with me. But you can also just go to the Elevate Services website and go to the info place, and you'll probably be led to me or one of my colleagues when it comes to contract management. Great. Great. Thanks, Prashant, and thanks everybody for listening to another episode. Uh, we hope to, uh, have you guys here, back here to listen to another episode soon. And also, uh, hopefully look forward to meeting some of, uh, some of you at maybe some in-person events as we come into the end of the year here. So thanks everybody, and that's it. Absolutely. Thank you.