Expand and Contract: How Companies Can Increase Value with Mainspring and Coupa
Today's post is written by guest author James Misterman, VP of Customer Strategy at Mainspring. James helps clients find user-centric solutions to contracting challenges. Mainspring is a certified CoupaLink Technology Partner that enables customers to automate contract extraction and jumpstart their Coupa CLM (Contract Lifecycle Management).
A typical Fortune 100 company maintains between 20,000 to 40,000 active contracts at any given time. To say that’s a lot of information to keep track of is an understatement. Your company may not have 40,000 contracts, but fully integrating data from, say a dozen contracts can bring new value to your business.
Beyond the obligations and expectations laid out, contracts can help companies pinpoint potential savings, reduce total spend, and better manage risk. To do that, organizations need a way to centralize, standardize, and streamline contract data capture.
Mainspring and Coupa can help. Here's how.
Common contract challenges
The most common contract challenge is sprawl. Contract sprawl happens when documents and their valuable data are decentralized and not easily searchable or findable. So even as companies make the move to digital contracts, these documents are often disconnected because they may be part of department data silos or stored in digital folders buried under layers and layers of unrelated information. This leaves companies with a host of contracts in force but no way to effectively pinpoint key provisions or extract specific data.
Without that reliable data visibility, companies face a second challenge: compliance enforcement. This could take the form of compliance with existing contract provisions, such as risk of regulatory non-compliance if contract data isn't properly secured or if specific data fields are incomplete.
With Mainspring and Coupa, customers have the tools they need to keep contracts consistent.
The Mainspring method for managing contracts: two paths to success
Mainspring offers two pathways for improved contract success in Coupa.
The first is Mainspring’s Contract Migration for Coupa CLM. Mainspring makes it possible for companies to migrate all existing contracts into their Coupa deployment. This starts with what we call historical simulation — where we take historical contracts loaded into the Coupa system and simulate them as if they were created directly in Coupa. Taking this approach means there's no distinction created between past, present, and future contracts, and it results in both increased contact data accuracy and a seamless user experience.
Then, the migration itself becomes simple. Businesses place all current contracts into a folder, which is ingested by Mainspring's AI-driven contract extraction technology. Contract documents are Optical Character Recognition (OCR) enabled, and data is collected, extracted, and validated by human review, and loaded to the Coupa platform.
To continuously manage contracts with Coupa, companies can use Mainspring’s Intelligent Contract Analyzer. This solution allows any user to leverage OCR for automatic text and clause extraction within the Coupa UI and upload fully-completed contracts directly into Coupa CLM without the need for human intervention.
All contracts extracted and migrated to Coupa are OCR-enabled, annotated, and searchable PDFs. Mainspring can automatically search for more than 1,000 built-in provisions across more than 20 file types, including PDF, Word, TIF, and PNG. Companies can even create their own custom extraction models using machine learning and their existing contract texts.
Benefits of better contract management
Mainspring’s contract data and analysis tools make it possible for businesses to achieve increased value in the following four key areas.
Rebate management
Many contracts include rebate or discount clauses that may go unnoticed or unused, especially if contracts aren't easily available for review. One common example is a volume discount that applies if businesses purchase specified product amounts from suppliers. While some suppliers may apply this discount automatically, others won't — meaning that if companies don't know about the provision, they could be leaving money on the table.
With Mainspring contract analysis and clause extraction capabilities, Coupa customers can maximize their rebate management.
Cost reduction
It's also possible to lower costs with improved contract management. Consider a large enterprise with departments that individually negotiate contracts for similar services from approved providers. The result may be duplicate contracts, which could be consolidated into a single, more cost-effective document. With intelligent contract analysis, companies can pinpoint potential areas of overlap and identify opportunities for more cost savings.
Risk mitigation
Regulatory compliance around data privacy, storage, and usage is evolving. As a result, companies must ensure that both contact approvals and the application of clauses are in line with regulatory obligations.
Improved negotiating power
With access to both current and past data about contract clauses and expectations, Coupa customers are better equipped to negotiate (or renegotiate) favorable contract terms.
From observable to operational contract management
Contracts remain an integral part of business operations. However, with many of these digital documents effectively orphaned, it's challenging for companies to unify contract data and capture value from the details. For organizations, the result is contract data that's observable but not operational. While companies can track down specific clauses and conditions, the value of contracts themselves remains locked behind disparate data sources.
If you have thousands of agreements or just want to collect data from ongoing contracts one-by-one, with Mainspring for Coupa, organizations can extract contract text and clauses directly into their Bussines Spend Management (BSM) platform, then operationalize these contractual documents to better control costs, reduce risk, and improve negotiating power.
Make the most of your contracts with Mainspring. Find the Contract Migration and Intelligent Contract Analyzer solutions on the Coupa App Marketplace.
