SimpliContract is on a mission to create what its Founder and CEO, Guru Venkatesan, calls a “connected contract experience.” Contract management processes, data, and tools are often fragmented and siloed, leading to missed opportunities, increased risk, and more frustration across teams and departments. Connecting procurement, legal, finance, accounting, and sales in a cohesive contract ecosystem can help companies bring their entire contract management process and data together into a single user friendly platform. “You have to summarize as simply as possible. You can visualize SimpliContract as an ERP for contracting,” said Guru. “It could be everything to do with contracts. It’s a system of records for your contracts, which is a system of process for your contracts. This is a system of data for your contracts.”
Guru explained to AOP host Kelly Barner where the inspiration for SimpliContract came from and how they’re taking a unique approach to contract management. As a former sales and marketing professional, Guru noticed a critical gap between the contracting process and the needs of various stakeholders… needs that were often not met or met poorly in ways that did not drive the business forward. Guru experienced this frustration first-hand, so he knows how frustrating inefficient contract management can be. “If you work for a company like Microsoft or Amazon or other large companies, selling is not the easiest, but contracting is the toughest,” Guru explained. “I worked in companies where 10 days out of the month, sellers are busy selling the deal and the other 20 days of the month, they’re just trying to contract the deal out.”
By founding SimpliContract, Guru and his team set out to offer a scalable, comprehensive contract management solution that addresses the needs of all stakeholders, buyers and sellers alike. They have created an infrastructure that builds connections and transparency at every step of the contracting process. As Guru points out, having a CLM platform that encourages widespread adoption and user satisfaction can have a profound impact on the business, including better risk awareness and risk management, shorter contract cycles, increasing confidence in and use of reliable contract data, or even improved compliance. SimpliContract consolidates contract data into one platform, and it also offers a unified, comprehensive approach to contract management that supports improved collaboration among departments and stakeholders – that’s the “connection” that Guru wants to bring to every client. “It’s connected processes, connected data, and connected systems,” he said.
SimpliContract focuses heavily on user experience, flexibility, and ease of integration into existing systems and processes. Its modular end-to-end implementation strategy sets companies up for long-term success by using a “crawl, walk, run, sprint” approach, which can help with risk assessment and adoption. SimpliContract supports companies at every stage: “For example, you can start with a repository, and then you can slowly move on to bringing in your first category of contract authority. Then the next category. Then all your indirect categories. Then you bring direct procurement into the system,” explained Guru. “We are end-to-end but modularized. We help at every stage of the contract. At every process, you can go deeper, but the process becomes wider.”
The impact of this approach can be significant for organizations of all sizes, not only saving time and resources but also providing valuable insights that can drive differentiated decision making.
The platform’s AI capabilities also help to accelerate the value to clients and optimize their contract processes, workflows, and data. For example, Guru said, they helped one large food and beverage company that was spending a billion dollars on logistics analyze 500 contracts in just three weeks, revealing critical insights about payment terms, termination clauses, and potential risks.
“We turned it around in three weeks for them. The reports and dashboards identified their top five vendors and they were able to play around with the data. In some cases there were 32 different payment terms for one category,” Guru explained.
Driving this type of efficiency through AI-assisted contract lifecycle management technology can play a significant role in shaping the value and insight procurement can bring to the business going forward.
“That’s the power of generative AI,” said Guru. “We help legal teams access data. We help procurement dig deeper into data. We help operations teams to get into data and use it the way they want.”
