Case Study: How Integrated Project Management Company Made Significant Time Savings

“Based on my calculations ... it will have paid for itself twice over within a year.” Nicole Bieganski, Corporate Paralegal.

Company - Integrated Project Management Company, Inc
Location - Illinois, USA
Description - IPM was established in 1988 as a professional services and business consulting firm with a sole focus—professional project management leadership. For over 30 years, IPM has improved customer PM capabilities by successfully managing over 4,000 projects, spanning multiple industries and objectives, for more than 400 clients. As a result of these experiences, IPM knows that process, discipline, and leadership are the key ingredients for successful project management.
Key Stakeholders for Gatekeeper - In-house Legal Team

Summary

IPM’s small in-house legal team holds responsibility for managing the business’s contracts through their lifecycle.

With customer numbers increasing rapidly, the team was finding it challenging to manage the ongoing obligations and renewals.

Following an unsuccessful attempt to implement a Sharepoint-based solution, they came to market in early 2018 looking for a more capable, specialist system.

Gatekeeper was selected, above two other competing solutions, to bring order to IPM’s contract universe.

Since going live with Gatekeeper, IPM’s team have enjoyed responsive and dedicated support from the Gatekeeper Team and have been able to enjoy hugely significant time-savings.

“Based on my calculations, using the cost of the time saved since Gatekeeper went live, it will have paid for itself twice over within a year.” Nicole Bieganski, Corporate Paralegal.

Why Gatekeeper?

Usability: Knowing that adoption across the business would be key to making the project successful, IPM placed a high priority on finding a solution with a clean, user-friendly interface. With its simple, elegant design Gatekeeper was the logical choice.

Pricing: Gatekeeper’s competitive pricing ensured that it was a favoured option when stacked up against IPM’s business case and success criteria.

Unlimited Users: Gatekeeper’s pricing model includes unlimited users across all plans. This removes another barrier to widespread adoption throughout the business and is vital for a small central function looking to increase its stakeholders’ direct access to information.

Integration Capabilities: With one eye on the future, Gatekeeper was also chosen for its ability to work with IPM’s current technology (eg. Microsoft SSO) and flexibility around potential forthcoming systems.

The full story

The story of IPM coming to market for a Contract Management System is a familiar one.

When businesses grow at a fast pace, there can often be a lag in how quickly they look to scale the back-office functions. Growing pains can be encountered in a variety of business areas such as Finance and HR and particularly in the Legal function.

In-house Legal teams are generally responsible for reviewing new business contracts and often by default are then obliged to take on responsibility for the ongoing management of contracts through their lifecycle.

This can present challenges around centralised record-keeping, management of key dates such as renewals, ongoing compliance and ad hoc requests for information.

This was the position that the legal team at IPM found themselves in at the start of 2018.

Having attempted to solve the issue initially with a Sharepoint-based solution, they found that this simply wasn’t fit for purpose and, due to lack of consistent adoption, was actually making processes harder to follow.

They came to market, as many companies do, when frustration at clunky internal systems combines with concern over missed renewals and escalating costs.

The risk of missed renewals was a constant source of frustration as the Legal Team worried that mismanagement of contracts could lead to customer relationships becoming strained.

In addition, the amount of time having to be given over by the legal team to basic contract administration was increasing significantly.

Responding to multiple requests for simple information like renewal dates and contact names was having to take precedence over more strategic and specialist work.

This was a waste of valuable resources and work that could be easily delegated with the right technology.

As a result, when Gatekeeper’s intuitive solution was demonstrated it was immediately obvious how it was going to work for IPM.

Its combination of clean user-interface and unlimited users on all plans would mean that relevant access could be delegated to internal stakeholders. This would allow them to self-serve for simple contract questions, saving the legal team significant amounts of time.

On top of that, the legal team would be able to streamline their own processes further once the data was centralised within Gatekeeper.

With data and documents simple to find, time could much better be focused on the legal work rather than administrative work.

Gatekeeper was one of three solutions to reach the final evaluation stage and was the stand-out choice.

The tailored implementation process began immediately after IPM signed up and proceeded at a pace that accommodated the IPM team’s needs to manage its other workload alongside the implementation.

The onboarding process was smooth, and IPM conducted training across its internal audience to encourage widespread adoption.

Of particular note, the IPM Legal team estimates that since Gatekeeper has been implemented, the amount of time saved searching for contracts while reviewing proposals could pay for the system twice over.

This represents a massive move forward for IPM and helps provide a solid platform for further growth.

What Gatekeeper means for IPM Day-to-Day

The key thing for IPM has been increased visibility of the business’s contracts to all the internal stakeholders:

• Managing Directors can easily check the Executive Dashboards to find which contracts are due for renewal in the near future.
• Colleagues at all levels can retrieve documents and check contract metadata for themselves without having to enlist the help of the legal department.

This has in turn meant that the Legal Team can focus more on specialist work, prepare in advance for contract renewals and no longer have to handle multiple interruptions for minor contract questions.

“The amount of headaches Gatekeeper has saved me really is significant. The executive dashboard is absolutely critical to my daily work.” - Nicole Bieganski, Corporate Paralegal.

The view from Gatekeeper

“IPM is a fast-growing business and we’re immensely pleased to be able to provide them with the scalable solution to meet their needs for both now and the future. They have very much engaged with our solution and with the Gatekeeper team to ensure they generate a great return on investment.

Our mission at Gatekeeper is always to help make our customers’ working lives easier, more pleasant and productive, and we’ve achieved that with IPM.” Patrick O’Connor, Director

If your business is growing quickly, it’s more than likely that you’re signing contracts to make it happen.

With increasing expectations around compliance and record-keeping coming from customers, regulators and investors, the earlier you invest in a scalable contract management solution the better.

If you’d like to understand more about how Gatekeeper can help your business scale, then get in touch today.