REDLine Management – Automating Complex Review Processes
Kemisoft was presented with a problem that was plaguing the Nintex and Salesforce customer space when it came to Contract Lifecycle Automation.
The result – REDLine Management by Kemisoft, purpose built for Nintex and Salesforce customers.
Contract automation simplicity is everyone’s business because it touches almost every department within a company during it’s lifecycle. Whether you oversee your organization’s Salesforce CRM platform, manage sales operations, work in IT or lead a sales team, you are affected by the contract lifecycle.
Many contracts flow through a path that looks pretty similar in most organizations. The document is created, pricing and terms are drafted, document is reviewed by internal and external stakeholders, legal reviews the terms or external review of any redlines, final agreement is obtained, signage is executed and finally the document is archived until it’s time for renewal or reviewed for compliance.
Contract lifecycle automation handles this workflow effectively, however, the pain that kept arising was around insights and bottlenecks that occurred in the redlining phase of the workflow.
REDLine Management (RLM) by Kemisoft was born as a result of this pain.
RLM is designed to take the redlining phase and automate the bottlenecks that occur in this stage.
External reviews and redlining cause version issues, leaves room for error or missed edits, and can involve multiple reviewers and can leave room for potential privacy protocol hiccups.
For example, we have encountered the following situation with more than a few customers:
Sales drafts up the services agreement for the purchase of their solution and services. The rep pulled the document for a locally stored version they had saved a few months earlier.
Pain Point #1 – unfortunately, this contract version is already outdated internally because there was no automated documentation creation process that creates only the latest version of the agreement.
Sales enters all the pricing; service estimates and discounts and then sends to the customer without an internal review on the discounting.
Pain Point #2 – pricing has remained a manual process outside the system, therefore, when discounting that should trigger an approval process internally are then missed, causing future points of tension further down the lifecycle, either internally or externally.
Customer reviews the document and makes their redline edits, those edits are then returned to the sales rep via email. The rep then sends to their manager, legal and finance to review.
Pain Point #3 – some organizations require data to only be seen by certain departments to remove bias in decision making over an edit. For example, legal is only suppose to see edits that adjust the legal stance of the language, but they are not allowed to see pricing because they may be harsher on the edits knowing the company is not providing a lot of revenue to the company for this deal.
Pain Point #4 – internal reviews then take place and are shared back to the rep. Thus, creating a new problem as everyone reviewed a separate document, saved only their edits, asked questions about areas they didn’t need to review and sent them back to the rep. The rep now must review the different versions, incorporate the changes into one document and answer the questions.
Pain Point #5 – Errors in combining the edits are high, internal pressure to understand why an old contract was used and the request to have them redline the right version (adding tension and frustration with the customer)
Pain Point #6 – Internal pressure on understanding how the discount was approved and requesting that pricing be revised (never a good customer experience) or internal decision to take actions that upset the rep (creating discontent internally with the rep)
Pain Point #7 – Knowing which version of the document is the latest and most up to date for sending back to the customer
The rep then sends the updated redline version back to the customer, who then repeats their steps and depending on the decisions based on the errors prior to this stage, they may become harder to negotiate with and start to second guess their purchase decision.
The cycle repeats until they come to a final agreement and the deal is completed or worst case, the deal falls apart and the overall experience fosters resentment and a loss of a deal that the company worked hard to get to the final stage only to have it fall apart because of multiple pain points that can be automated and mitigated against.
RLM is the new way to streamline document management.
Drive sales, increase productivity, simplify processes. Implement RLM today.
