At NextLevel 2013, several of our customers provided a look inside their organizations and discussed some of the challenges they face in contract management, spend analysis, accounts payable, supplier management and collaborative procurement. We’re excited to now share these stories with you in The Open Kitchen! In the coming weeks, we’ll be highlighting customers across a variety of industries using SciQuest products. And, while each of their stories is unique we believe many of you will see some of your own challenges in their journeys, and learn from the solutions they have chosen to implement.
Our first customer story features Eastman Chemical, a global chemical manufacturer employing approximately 14,000 worldwide. Eastman manufactures the chemicals and fibers found in just about every product you use on a daily basis — from the paint and tires used on your car, to water bottles, makeup and fabric in your clothing. In this video, three Eastman employees discuss the organization’s migration from paper-based contracts to an automated system — and the challenges and successes along the way.
Transcript:
Eastman Chemical is a manufacturer of chemicals that are used in a lot of products that you see around your home and business. We are a global company.
We have offices in manufacturing locations in all regions of the world.
We have about fourteen thousand (14,000) contracts in our system now. We recently acquired another company and we expect the number of contracts that are associated with that acquisition to maybe triple the number of contracts that we will have.
So we’re looking at what directionaly now a ten billion dollar company and sales revenue after acquisition of Solutia.
There are substantial number of sales contract supporting that ten billion dollars worth of business. Likewise there is a substantial number of procurement contracts and other types of contracts.
In the past contract management was handled primarily using a lot of paper and routing through the mail system.
We had no single place that all our contracts were kept. I think that was probably one of the most critical problems and needs to be resolved.
So the ability to go into a centralized portal; retrieve, manage, update, store, documents and maintain any documents.
I mean it’s essential to our contract management system.
We’ve certainly had occasions here where we have a failure to recognize events we should have in contract management.
We had about fifty requirements when when we did our RFX. The ability to easily get reports out of the system. The ability to have reminders in tax associated with contracts. We had a lot of security requirements that we were looking for.
We had to balance the needs of procurement with the needs of sales, with the needs of technology and confidentiality agreements.
And make sure that could fit the needs of all of our users.
Contact Director is a great product. Our users adapt to it very well in very quickly.SciQuest is customer focused.
The idea that i have a representative that I can call that I can meet with and also get answers from anytime it is necessary from a development standpoint that’s very critical.
We believe Contract Director is brining significant value to Eastman Chemical Company.
It’s helping us make sure that we sustain agreements that we don’t want to terminate. Helping us review agreements that we may not be as happy with that we would like to terminate.
And understanding what the performance of those contracts is looking like as well.
Is the customer really buying as much as we understood that they were going to buy. And if they’re not is somebody checking to understand why is that happening.
That would’ve taken many man hours in the past and… it just wasn’t practical to do having that done for us now through systems is just a great benefit for us.
If you ask a lot of our users today they can’t imagine not having the system. There so many opportunities to sustain value by having a capability like Contract Director. How
how can you not implement that? Because without it you’re going to miss opportunities that are going to be costly to your business.We are light years ahead of where we used to be. Doing contract management well does bring value to the company.
And it is not simply an academic or intellectual exercise that we want to know where everything is, but these contracts have been put in place because they create value for us, for suppliers, for our customers.
You wouldn’t be maintaining your fiduciary responsibilities for the shareholders if you’re not doing something like that.
Beth Faber, Contracts and Sales Incentive Manager
Robert Smith, Director, Corporate Pricing
Jackie Sylvester, Principle Assistance Analyst
