Contract management technology has come a long way in the past fifteen years, evolving from central repositories to contract authoring and standard workflows, to most recently, contract discovery and analytics. It is a force that has been gathering steam, with more enterprises realizing that there is great value in not only knowing where their contracts are within the enterprise, but also, and perhaps as importantly, what is in their contracts and how it will affect the enterprise. This is especially true now that new and evolving risks have been emerging and enterprises need to quickly understand their contractual liabilities and how to respond.

Ardent Partners’ analyst team recently caught up with Lloyd Alexander, Vice President of Contract Strategy at Seal Software, a San Francisco-based provider of contract analytics and discovery solutions. Seal came onto the scene in 2010 and was founded by Ulf Zetterberg, currently CEO, and Kevin Gidney, currently CTO. We spotlighted Seal several months ago as a Hot Tech Prospect for 2015 (click here to read our analysis of the company and its solutions). We were happy to connect with Lloyd and hear more about how Seal’s Contract Discovery and Analytics solutions fit within the broader contract management solution landscape, and bring them to the forefront of contract and supplier risk mitigation.

Automating Search and Discovery

Many enterprises have grappled for many years to wrap their collective heads around the sheer volume of contracts and contract information residing across their organizations. Central, searchable repositories and digital contract authoring solutions have enabled internal stakeholders to wrangle contracts, but many contracts still exist in organizational silos, backup drives, in the cloud, in email, or on paper. They also remain in the disparate systems across the enterprise, like CRM, CLM, and ERP, noted Alexander. Each contains pieces of contract information, but unless these systems are linked, it is difficult and time consuming to get an enterprise view of a particular contract. Users have to drop what they are doing and manually search every avenue for a contract and its related information. The process can take days or weeks.

Seal Software realized that there was a need in the technology market for a solution that automatically reviews contracts and contract information residing across the enterprise, and went to market with such a solution. Seal’s Contract Discovery allows end users to leverage rule-based queries that cast a wide net across the enterprise and pull in all related documents and information. Users interface with the documents only to review, or to handle exceptions when the document in question was not scanned and captured adequately. Automating the process saves end users many hours manually searching for such documents and information, and allows them to aggregate their results onto one consolidated platform.

Analyzing Key Terms and Conditions

Contract Discovery provides users with the bandwidth to undertake more strategic, value-adding actions, such as analyzing what is in their contracts and how it affects their business. Contract Analytics, Seal’s other primary solution, does just that. Although header-level information, like contract type, expiration date, and who the supplier is are all important to know, Alexander noted that the real value of Seal’s solution is the ability to dig several layers deeper into the contract and provide enhanced visibility. Chief Procurement Officers, in particular, find great value in Seal’s Contract Analytics solution because, as Alexander noted, it allows them and their teams to distil actionable contract intelligence for nearly real-time advantage. Alexander noted several examples of how Seal’s Contract Analytics solution helps CPOs and their teams be agile and responsive vis-à-vis sudden or emerging market events.

First, Contract Analytics can help enterprises respond to increasingly common occurrences, like cyber attacks and data breaches. Under these circumstances, Alexander noted that enterprises are usually required to contact customers that the breach occurred and that their data may have been compromised, particularly in the banking, healthcare, and retail industries. Often, third parties are involved, such as financial institutions, and there can be confusion as to which party is obligated to respond to the consumer and by when. With Contract Analytics, CPOs and other internal stakeholders, like legal departments, can save precious time by analyzing their contracts to determine whose duty it is to inform, and how to tier such notifications. With manual processes, users would not be able to respond in time to meet their contractual or regulatory requirements, whereas automated searching and analytics allows for rapid review, analysis, and notification.

Contract Analytics can also greatly assist enterprises undergoing mergers, acquisitions, or divestitures by providing them with valuable contract intelligence to make informed decisions. Alexander noted the trouble that certain organizations, like HP, have experienced following unsuccessful M&As because they did not fully understand the assets and liabilities that they were assuming in the deal. Had they leveraged a solution, like Contract Analytics, they might have had greater intelligence and might have made different decisions, not the least of which to reverse course. Seal’s Contract Analytics solution could also be helpful in the event that enterprises decide to divest one or more parts of the business. Here, Alexander notes that it can assist decision makers with understanding what contracts are most/least valuable to all stakeholders, and how to divide up the book of business.

What’s Next for Seal?

Alexander was rather mum on what Seal would be up to in the third and fourth quarters of 2015, except to say that they would be improving their already robust rule sets. “Although they’re easy today, we’re just making it that much more intuitive to maximize adoption.” He noted that Seal’s team is growing,  with new hires in San Francisco, across the United States, and in Europe. Specifically, they have expanded their workforce in the UK, are expanding into France, and have just hired their first employee in Germany. Their company growth follows and reflects their growth in the contract management market, and how it has responded to their offerings, said Alexander. Indeed, when we spoke to him in early July, Seal had just announced its newest customer relationship with Ascend Performance Materials. More recently, Seal announced a similar deal with McKesson, a Bay Area healthcare giant.

Final Thoughts

Seal Software brings a unique set of solutions to the market, which can help CPOs, procurement teams, and constituent stakeholders that are often overwhelmed by paper and paperless contracts, alike. Contract Discovery and Analytics can perform more of the heavy lifting for procurement and legal teams, allowing them to retrieve a lot (or a little) information in a comparatively small amount of time, and quickly find valuable insights that were hiding in their contracts. This level of visibility can allow them to make more informed decisions quicker, respond to sudden events or requests for information, avoid or mitigate risks, and return greater value to the enterprise.

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Tagged in: Ardent Team, Chief Procurement Officer, Contract Lifecycle Management, CPO, Innovation, Process, Solution Providers, Technology