CHALLENGE:
A complex, global staffing model
With the company’s capabilities spanning across multiple industries, skillsets, and regions, they wanted to define an enterprise view of their E2E Sales, Recruiting, Customer Contract Creation, Employee Onboarding, Project Execution, and Project Close process. This led to the beginning of their digital transformation journey, which is focused on standardizing and modernizing across all key operating companies for the above-mentioned processes, leveraging best-in-class cloud capabilities through enhancements of their existing CRM, introducing a new CLM system, and overhauling their ERP.
Contract lifecycle management (CLM) played a critical role in this transformation. For contract drafting, negotiation, approvals, and storage, they previously completed this process in a very manual fashion using multiple systems such as email, SharePoint, and local repositories. The absence of a centralized, standardized system created inefficiencies, delayed contract execution, and limited visibility into contract statuses. Additionally, each operating company had unique contract routing, review processes, and metadata requirements, necessitating a flexible yet unified solution. Finally, each OpCo is organized based on their offering to the market, and some of the OpCos preferred a more sales-centric approach while others preferred a more legal-centric configuration.
SOLUTION:
Scalable, integrated approach to a unified CLM
To address the company’s challenges, Spaulding Ridge embarked on a structured implementation of a new CLM system. The initial step was a global review of contracting across the enterprise. This initial phase involved numerous stakeholder interviews and deep collaboration with different business units to understand their unique contract routing, review processes, personas involved, metadata requirements, as well as key pain points. Each operating company had its own way of handling contracts, so the goal was to create a scalable yet adaptable framework that could accommodate all contracts while allowing for necessary customizations. Upon defining the overall key global design and use cases, a roadmap for the CLM program was defined to define an implementation and enablement plan across the enterprise.
After completion of the initial phase, the first OpCo was selected to serve as a pilot for the broader rollout. In this pilot implementation, SR designed a model to create a standardized approach to draft, review, and negotiate contractual agreements. Key personas included Contracts, Legal, and numerous teams across their compliance department (ex. Drug/Background/Medical compliance, InfoSec, Finance).
One of the key integrations is with Salesforce, enabling them to generate contracts directly from customer records and automatically pull in relevant client data as well as increase visibility of the contract status within the Salesforce platform itself. This eliminated the need for manual data entry and ensured consistent client metadata across contract documents. Additionally, as contract status updates were fed back into Salesforce in real time, sales teams could readily view the progress of their contracts (from drafting through execution) without having to navigate outside Salesforce, maintaining the approach of keeping Sales users in Salesforce, where they interact every day.
As the system proved successful with the first operating company, CLM was gradually expanded to other operating companies. While the core framework and foundational configuration remained the same, each rollout involved tailored adjustments to accommodate business/organizational structure, regional differences in language, approval hierarchies, and compliance requirements.
To further enhance contract visibility and reporting capabilities, we integrated their new CLM with Snowflake, enabling advanced data analytics via other advanced reporting tools, such as Tableau, Power BI, and Seismic. This allowed leadership teams to gain insights into contract trends, approval cycle times, and areas for process optimization within a platform that they are already familiar with, versus learning a new system to review reporting. Additionally, the Snowflake integration also allows other personas within the back-office functions gain visibility for key client contractual obligations (i.e. employee Drug/Background/Medical check requirements), without needing to access the CLM system directly.
Finally, in collaboration with the company’s IS and business partners, over 200,000 historical contract documents and data from legacy systems were migrated into the CLM central repository, ensuring that past agreements remained accessible within the new system. Data extraction capabilities with Snowflake AI were also leveraged to simplify and expedite the entry of historical contract datapoints into the new CLM repository. This ultimately saved 50%+ of the typical time needed for building a historical legacy migration manifest.
Since the successful completion of its initial roll-out, they have successfully standardized its contract management process while maintaining the flexibility needed for its global operations. The seamless integration with Salesforce, centralized workflow process and repository, and data-driven insights via pushing of key contract data into Snowflake has positioned the company for long-term efficiency and scalability. They continue to refine their processes, expanding CLM internationally with other languages such as French, Spanish, and German, deeper system integrations, and further enhancements to its contract workflows. Over 5,000 users are expected to be onboarded by the end of the year and OpCo rollouts are projected to continue into 2026 and 2027.
RESULTS:
A future-ready contracting process
The transformation has yielded significant improvements in efficiency and visibility. Key outcomes were:
- Accelerated sales cycles: For the company’s sales teams, this transformation has been particularly impactful. With a more structured and automated process, sellers can now move contracts through approvals faster, reducing delays and accelerating deal closures. This efficiency not only shortens sales cycles but also empowers them to close bigger deals with greater confidence, supporting its continued expansion and business growth.
- Increased system adoption: By the end of 2026, over 5,000 users, will be actively leveraging the CLM. Sales will make up 75% of this user base.
- Enhanced data visibility: Teams now have clear insights into contract statuses, eliminating the need for manual tracking and improving cycle times. The improved visibility via Salesforce and Snowflake integrations also helps sales teams proactively manage negotiations and ensures smoother collaboration with stakeholders.
- Process standardization across operating companies: While each OpCo and region retains its unique operational nuances, a centralized repository and consistent contract framework have streamlined global operations.
- Advanced reporting capabilities: With data now integrated into Snowflake, they can extract valuable insights to optimize contract execution and compliance.
