Success Hours Webinar Series: Workflow 101

Success hours Webinar: Workflow 101

Transcript | 6 July 2023

Lucy Chu: Hi, everyone. We're just going to wait a couple minutes before starting the webinar as attendees are still joining.

But I did want to point out that we do have our Gatekeeper knowledge base, which is a great tool for whether you're a new Gatekeeper just starting out or an experienced Gatekeeper looking to get the most out of the platform.You can always access it via your Gatekeeper account, there is the help center button where you can also directly search for any questions on more articles that you have.

James, Daniel, anything new on your end that you would like to point out before we get started?

James Ince: Yeah. I guess I can I can go first because this is quite an exciting one from the from the product update side. So we've recently I think it's back in March.

We had our first set updated our best practice workflow templates library, which is handy that we're that I'm mentioning that in today's session because we're about to dive into workflows, but recently updated it with a new template specifically for ESG assessments for vendors.I know that's a a growing trend in the due diligence and supply management world. So it's it's one that we're excited to have launched.

Just a couple of weeks ago, I think it was two weeks ago, it went into production. So if you do have the desire to start assessing your vendors for environmental social governance, then, yeah, there's a process that's already built in your it keep environment along with a walk through guide of how to get it configured.
So that's that's pretty cool.Daniel Barnes: Yeah. It's a it's a good workflow to to have for sure. And yeah, just Lucy, on my side, I know I talk about this, I think, every month we put these webinars on, but we do have a podcast called procurement reimagined.

And this week's episode that just went out, actually it went out a week ago, is a compilation episode, so we've had eight We've had about ten guests on and we put about seven or eight of them into a single episode just to showcase some of their top forts or some interesting forts that they had, so it's a really good episode.

This was a bit longer. It's about forty five minutes long. So if you do want to check out, maybe go for a run, go for a walk, and put it on two times speed.

And yeah, hopefully you'll get some good value out of that.

LC: And make sure to subscribe if you aren't already.

DB: Yeah. Fine. Well, thanks for including that part. Yeah. Yeah.Cool. Well, let's get started. It seems like we have quite a few attendees joining us already.

So, hi, everyone. My name is Lucy Chu. I'm the Learning Experience Lead here at Gatekeeper. And for today's webinar, I'm joined by James Ince, our Learning Experience Designer and Daniel Barnes, our Community Manager.And to kick things off, before we get started into the webinar, I wanted to quickly review our Gatekeeper three pillars, our restore visibility, take control, and safeguard compliance.Now, for those of you who have joined us in our previous webinars, you'll be quite familiar with these three pillars. But if you're new, this stairway approach is how we at Gatekeeper really encourage everyone to follow in order to enable effective vendor and contract lifecycle management.So, in our previous webinars, we've completed the restored visibility series. Where we focus on where your data is stored and how people can view it as well as use it.And today's webinar kicks off the take control portion where we're focusing on our workflows.And this is where you'll be able to see how creating digital processes will really benefit your company.And overall, these will form the foundations of our safeguard compliance, where it's based on our third party risk management.
And you'll be able to automate your vendor compliance, identify, and track any of your risks, and move from a more reactive to a proactive way of working with risk management.Now for today's webinar, we're going to be focusing on the fundamentals of workflows.And you'll be learning some of the benefits of digitilization and automating your business processes and learning more about the key components of a Gatekeeper workflow, which includes kanban boards, phases, forms, as well as tasks, and we'll be going over some use cases.We're not planning to show any configuration, but still feel free to ask any questions that you have using the Q and A button, as well as the chat in Zoom, and we'll be able to answer any questions throughout the webinar, as well as we have some time at the very end, specifically dedicated for questions.DB: Yeah, thanks for that, Lucy. I was just going to say, questions are always good, like James loves questions as well.

I just want to point that out to anyone, James is such a nerd when it comes to these workflows that just ask as many questions as you want and we will try and get through them.

Or if we can't in this session, we can build them into our future sessions because we're probably on this control series for a little while, but just for now, I just want to gauge your your knowledge of workflow.

So Lucy, I think we've got a poll that we're going to run now.Awesome. Thank you. Hopefully everyone can see that where we'll just leave this up for about thirty seconds to a minute, not too long.

I can see we've got a fair few people in, so we might just give it a little bit more time.And yeah, like to Lucy's point, we're not really going to dive into the admin in this session.

We're just kind of and give you like a really clear overview of like how do our workflows work, how do they operate, how we can get value out of them, and then like we can go into loads of detail in subsequent sessions around various little parts of it, and James, like I said, is a pro at workflows, he pretty much for me.

I'd say, James, you've probably put me everything I know on on board outflows initially. 

JI: I don't know. There might have been quite a lot of self learning learning on the on the go. On the knowledge base. Yeah. Yeah.Actually, that's a good point. Lucy called it out to start. I devoured the knowledge base when I first picked up Gatekeeper. I think I read the entire thing within, like, half a day a day just to just to learn it. But that's-LC: Very fast reading.

DB: A little bit odd, like yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I like to have a read for sure. Awesome.LC: Let me end this poll and yeah. Check out our results here.DB: Yeah, so we've got a it's actually more mixed than usual.We normally have a lot of beginners, on here, and we've got still a contingent of little to no knowledge to some understanding, so I think this discussion is going to be perfect for the majority of people here and even people who are familiar or who or even work for admins will hopefully pick up a thing or two for sure. And yeah, especially to those admins.

If you have any questions, please ask throughout.

LC: Perfect. Thanks, Daniel.So, Daniel, why would you say the digitalization of business processes is so important to our Gatekeepers?

DB: Yeah, it's a good question. I was actually thinking about this a bit today because I know we were talking about this a little bit yesterday.

But in short, like I think the major benefit is like bringing everything into one place, and James will kind of cover this in a moment, I think, as well.But most procurement contracts, legal people will typically have a whole suite but they kind of work through, whether it's email, Slack, project management, systems, it might be Trello, Asana, something like that, a lot of people just have email and a word, a lot of people I still talk to you every day still doing things with paper documents, scanning documents, and all sorts.

And when you're working like that, it's really hard to know what's going on at any one moment within your vendor or contract base. And as soon as you digitalize, effectively, your processes are in one place, everyone that needs to use those processes has to come to that one place to do so and it gives you control over that end to end process.So that's really the big takeaway for me there's a lot of other benefits, right? Like time, time saved.

If you set it up correctly, if you don't just transpose a manual process into a digital platform, can save a lot of time, get a lot of good data, you can restore visibility very quickly because your data flows are good, and you can help root I would say you could really automate a lot of the compliance side of things.I imagine some of the people in this school are probably dealt with like ISO audits, SOC audits where they've had to, like, go through loads of emails, go through SharePoint to find proof of stuff when you've got Gatekeepers kind of all there in one place.

So yeah, I'll leave it at that, Lucy, because I will talk for days about this otherwise.LC: Yeah. Thanks, Daniel.So, James, can you tell us a little bit more about the benefits of using Gatekeeper for workflow automation?

JI: Well, yeah. And I and I could talk for days about this bit as well, but I've I really like that first bit that Daniel mentioned. Whilst he was talking it through you, I was, like, internally going Yeah. Yeah.That's bang on. But the first bit you mentioned around having a centralized product that, you know, manages your processes really crosses these two first two pillars we've actually got on the screen.

Both from an oversight perspective, if you're like managing a contract approval process or a vendor onboarding process, and you're using a few different applications for that, like Daniel mentioned, you mentioned a few like Jira, Asana, Slack, email.

That's the sort of thing that happens naturally over time, like your tech stack might you know, evolve and just you might start adding extra things to it or it could be the other side of the coin, like you mentioned there, Daniel, where people just use, you know, physical pieces of paper and email or, like, phone calls.DB: Yeah. Like, it gets the job done. Right? Like, it gets the job done for this.We have a slide on this, don't we? Do we have a slide to to show some of this? Am I gonna jump in the gun there for you? James.

JI: No. No. No. No. I was good. I was gonna call it out any second.

I I love this slide because it it helps visualize, you know, this is the point we're trying to make there that if you don't have like a centralized tool, you could end up with a tech stack like this where each of these products individually, yeah, it definitely does its job, but that oversight of a process and, you know, the user experience will vary greatly.Like, being able to see how many contracts are currently out for execution, how many contracts are we negotiating, how many people do we have to get back to, really difficult when you have to chase down emails and look in, like, three different applications for that.

And just not just not just useful for the process side. This is on one of your podcasts recently. It's useful from that audit trail perspective.

If, like, in two years time you want to know who requested this supplier agreement and who approved it, who approved the budget, and who you know, signed that MSA.

If you have a tech stack like this slideshow we've got on the screen, it becomes really hard to dig into the past to see what happened.

Whereas and I think we have a following slide after this one. Whereas if you're a tech stack and this is a an ideal scenario, obviously, this is an ideal world where every you do do everything in Gatekeeper.

But if you have us a setup like this where all of these steps in an end to end process for getting a new contract approved, getting a vendor onboarded.

If they all take place in the same system, finding historic information as well as current process information just becomes so much easier. You know, that's where to go. Yeah.

DB: Yeah. Yeah. That's a good point because, like, I did the audits pre Gatekeeper via SharePoint, email Slack. And spent weeks getting all the data together, and with Gatekeeper just showed the auditors on a Zoom call, and they were largely happy that still wanted me to screenshot a couple of bits because auditors love that.But, yeah, it was much easier second time around.

JI: Did you not invite your auditors into Gatekeeper? Give them, like, guest logins to show them

DB: Considered it. Just like kind of worried that they're, like, snoop. A little bit too much at times. That was all.

JI: Yeah. Fair.

LC: We also have a poll just curious about our attendees today, what kind of how you're using Gatekeeper to automate your business processes.

So just launching this poll here, we'll give it a couple minutes, and, yeah, Daniel, feel free to tell us more about your experiences before joining Gatekeeper.

DB: Yeah, yeah, this is a I'm always interested to hear how people are using Gatekeeper or just like what process they have in the first place.

But fundamentally, and I was chatting to you guys about this yesterday, what are the problem areas with vendor and contract contract management and it's typically vendor onboarding can be painful, especially when you're doing it through excel spreadsheets and email.

Two sort of times, so that's a one major use case contract reviews was another one and that was me selfishly saying that because I used to manage one of the new contrast with with my yeah.

Just on my own now with my legal team that I had to to lean on. And then, like, there was just, like, one, I just wanted to to to call out, and it's we we we call it file expiry workflow here. Right?

And that's a workflow or a process where we are chasing up all of that supporting documentation that you need to renew every year.So it could be insurance certificate, SOC certificate. It could be business continuity plans. James, you mentioned ESG early on our new best practice workflow.

I think that from a vendor management perspective, we're going to be getting a lot more ESG documentation.I know that some of our customers we already have are are doing stuff around that. But the amount of evidence that we are collecting from our vendors is only going up.

So that workflow is great, right, because it just notifies the vendor they upload the documents through the vendor portal, and you don't have to do all of that chasing.

And it won't escalate it and, like, alert you if it's taken too long. But the team that I had in my last month, they would spend before we had that countless hours every single week chasing vendors. For documentation.

We used to have a whole part of our meetings, our weekly meetings dedicated to it, and just getting rid of that.

Just freed them up, and one of them said, I don't know what I'm gonna do with my time now because I don't have to do that.

It's like just opened up a whole new world of like, oh, I can actually go and do really good valuable, like, procurement sourcing, vendor management work, which is great.

JI: Just but it's so obvious. Right?

Like, if you went to an organization and said, well, we're gonna go back to doing it the manual way where you have to make note of all the documents you need to stay on top of and the vendors you're managing and you have to chase them yourself, just be a nightmare when you consider the alternative.

But that's such a simple workflow, that fire expiry one, but it's super useful. For sure.

DB: Yeah. I kinda think it's my favorite in a weird way. Just like it's so simple. It's just so brilliant.LC: I see that we have quite a few people who selected others. I'm just gonna end the poll here. If you did put others, we're quite curious to see what how, what other ways that you're using it aside from the ones on the screen. So, feel free to share that via the, the chat there.But yeah, we have quite a few, I think, the highest one result here is contract renewals, and internal contract requests.

Oh, and contract amendment requests.

DB: That's great. Just click in here. We actually just got one question come in, which was can you just discuss the Touchless NDA feature?

I appreciate that was on the the poll there. Is it and James, we might just need to get the CS team to double check on what versions of Gatekeeper you can use that on, but maybe you can talk to it.What is this workflow?

JI: So the Touchless NDA workflow, and we'll get more into types of workflow and, like, the ways that they can be initiated and what they can do in a little bit later in this session.

And obviously, we'll explore some of these in more depth in later webinars too, but just as the elevator pitch of a Touchless NDA workflow, it's one where via the link that you provide to your external parties that you wanna get an NDA in place with.

From that link, they can self register their user account and their actual vendor record in your repository using a bit of our AI AutoBuild solution that makes it a bit slicker from their user experience perspective, and they can preview your NDA terms directly in this external page so they can confirm ahead of time that they're happy to get them signed that processes later on get move a lot quicker.And once they initiate that Touchless form, Gatekeeper will generate that NDA draft from one of your pre built templates for you.

And depending on the the scope of the workflow that you build out, such as NDA can vary slightly.

You can either then conduct the negotiation cycle straight after having created the template, or you can just immediately send it back to that supplier to get signed.

So that from that point on, they're in your system and you can start doing more advanced things like proper onboarding them or, you know, more advanced contracts that you need to get negotiated and executed there too.

Is that --

DB: Yeah.

JI: -- sufficient like just to as a --

DB: Yeah. Yeah.

JI: -- just to know what it does.

DB: No. Definitely. No. I really like it. I think we have probably end up doing some sort of session around that, like, NDA is typically high volume, problematic, and annoying documents that most procurement, legal contracting teams deal with.And it's for me it's like a really easy way to to get around a lot of the hassle around it, especially if you pair it with it like standardized NDA template and there's some in the UK and Europe and the U.S. That are, I think, gaining traction there.

Just looking here as well, Simon mentioned that they're using Gatekeeper for regulatory compliance, supply governance process and materials.

Jennifer mentioned SLA management, vendor compliance as well. So it's like, yeah, there's a lot you can do with these workflow, so it's interesting to see those.

LC: Perfect. Yeah. James Daniel, are we ready to jump into workflows?

JI: Yeah. Let's do it. DB: Yeah. James can pull that up.

LC: Yeah. So just Everybody here, please keep in mind that some of the content covered today may be directed more towards our Gatekeeper admin users who are currently using workflows.Or it might cover a view that you're not particular particularly familiar with, but if you're not currently a Gatekeeper admin or using workflows, we hope that some of the stuff that you see today will be useful in the future. Or you'll start using it very soon.

So James, for someone starting out to using workflows, what should they even know before getting started?JI: Before getting started. Right? I guess, beef just to talk about what a workflow is in Gatekeeper terms, because workflow it means different things to different people.

So if I share my screen, because I've got some workflows ready made to show that sort of exemplify the process.

And in, like, old old webinars, we have talked about workflows and command boards and even in the restore visibility.

They were hinted at from time to time, but it'd be good to just explain them.

So to Gatekeeper, a workflow is a Kanban board like this. And if you aren't familiar with the term 'Kanban', it's just a project management term first particular methodology, so you might not know what gantt charts are you might prefer to do lists.

But Kanban board is a really good way of structuring and organizing a process. So the key elements that you have--.

DB: James. Just quickly, your Zoom is coming through on your share screen just a little bit on mine. I just wanted to just on the right side, it's gone away now by the looks of things.No worries. I don't know there was no easy way to interrupt you there.

JI: That's fine. Thanks for letting me know.The Kanban. No worries. That's fine. Right.

So we've got our Kanban board up. Hopefully, like, wasn't too obscure.

DB: All good.

JI: So this is what could be considered like a proto Kanban board?

Like, the original version of a Kanban board would be basically a board containing three columns in its original format, you would have the to do column, which in this case would be a contract being requested. You would have the doing like the in progress column.So a contract in this case may being negotiated and executed, then you would have the final column which is done, which is those contracts that where all the tasks have been completed.

And this, you know, We don't have I don't think any clients that use workflows in this simplistic in nature, because what you can do from the next element of kanban boards is actually take those columns, always we call them phases, and not just make them to do piles, but actually configure them to represent the actual stages of a process.

So on this board that I've just opened up opened up here, this one has phases that have been named after specific steps of a this in this case, a simple contract negotiation and execution workflow, and each step will represent a point at this point in the process of getting a contract executed that will have cards move through it as they complete the various tasks.

And one of the key elements that I'll just call out here before we deep dive into some of the more advanced stuff, is that on each of these phases that represent a task, Gatekeeper will not just facilitate the actual task itself like contract negotiation.

Contract approval, but also delegate the responsibility to the relevant party. So who is it from our organization?

That needs to be negotiating contracts once they're ready to do that. Well, there's there's monetary fields that I didn't realize I'd put here.

But let's say this contract had been requested and moved over to the next stage of the workflow board, who would be responsible for getting that contract negotiated to get people would assign the relevant individual or team or teams depending on the the scope of your workflow to complete that task.

I guess we should talk talk really about what a card is as well because we've talked about the board that obviously represents the process and these phases that represent steps of a process.

A card is a key part of that as well because that's the actual contract or supplier or any object or record that's moving through the process completing the steps as it goes.

And I'll open up a different board for this one because we've got a more complex one over here that has a bit more information on these card levels. So like I said, a card is It it is what it is.

It it's something that represents the contract or the vendor moving through the process. And as it goes through, It will collect metadata. People will be reviewing it. There'll be documents and and negotiations, approvals, signatures taking place.

And so whilst you're on a Kanban board, this is nice this is that nice restored visibility bit lead, Daniel, that you mentioned having oversight of processes, you can easily see by by looking at a card. First off, what phase is it on?

So what has it gone through to get to that point? By the phase it's on, you can also see what is it currently doing, and there's a few other bits that you can glance at the card level to see what's what's happening right now, what's the current status of this.

I guess I could I'll quickly cover these off I don't wanna spend I don't wanna linger too long. 
DB: No. I feel it's good too.

JI: High level stuff.DB: Like, for example, James, like, when I look at this, I'm like, oh, there's, like, a little contract file, like icon --

JI: Yeah. --

DB: on that, like is that to signify there's, like, a a contract in the card. Right?

JI: Exactly. So this is the same icon. Some people might have connected these dots.If I look in my left hand menu, this contract repository, this is the same icon, and that that lets me know that there is a contract metadata record that is linked to this card.

And the way that that's probably happened is because this is an internal contract request workflow, it's probably been created via this workflow process, and now the card being at this stage, it's out for eSign because of as we can see it is here, there should be a contract record there.

And it this actually functionally actually does something. So it's the case that it's not just an icon to let you know that there's a contract linked to this particular card.

I can actually click this to take myself through to the contract depository to actually open up that record instantly. In case, you know, that's just one of those tips for quickly navigating around Gatekeeper, I guess.

DB: It's a good one. It's a really good one. Like, rather than click like, saving seconds --

JI: Yeah.

DB: -- for four. What's the just on the card though, like, we I Is that Lucy there? Lucy, is that you on on that card?

LC: Yep.

JI: That is Lucy. She is a she is a user in this environment.

So on on the left hand side of cards, what you'll get an indication of who's responsible for that task at that particular time.

And like I mentioned, while we're on the previous board, phases can be configured to automatically assign either individuals who are the relevant stakeholders for performing a certain action.So in this one, Lucy will have been the one to send out this statement of work for eSign or teams. So in in this card over here, this has been assigned to the legal team to do that, maybe because Lucy wasn't the appropriate person to be managing the signature on this phase.

And these let you know who's currently who currently owns that card. And there's a workflow admin feature. So for our workflow admins that are attending this, clicking these icons, can allow you to either change or assign new owners like instantly.So I did talk about the fact that Gatekeeper will generally be configured to automatically assign owners.

That's one of the really nice ways that it streamlines processes and removes manual I've been work, just when a card arrives at particular phase, check who should be doing that task and assign them as the owner and notify them.

But from time to time, you might want extra extra users to come in and take over or lend an extra pair of eyes, and you can do that instantly by clicking that icon and then assigning like an extra team, an extra user or extra groups.

DB: This is just good like a really good one if someone's suddenly out sick and you can't plan for that. You can't delegate beforehand, the workflow delegation, so we can just go in change it.

JI: Mhmm.

DB: James, the the numbers, forty I'm looking at forty seven days there.

Can I just go go through those?
JI: I guess, not all workflows will have three these are timers.And not all workflow cards will have three here, but I'll just cover the first two that will always be in in place.

One will show you how long a card has been on the workflow. So in this case, that this is an internal contract request workflow, it will tell you when the request came in.

So as we can see, This one came in on the eleventh of May, so it's been here forty seven days. And the next one will tell you how long it's been at the current phase.

So that gives you that at a glance indication as how long is this you know, contract approval process been running for this particular card and how long has has it been with Lucy to get it signed?

So you can see both the end to end time and the current, like, how long is this current process taking.

The third timer here is an extra feature that we definitely recommend a lot of our clients should be configuring for their phase by phase rules.

And it's we call it an SLA timer, but it's essentially like a countdown timer to give a deadline for a particular task to be performed.

And the way that these work is when you set them for a particular phase, so let's say you think e-signatures should be taking seven days to get done and dusted. When a card lands at that phase, the countdown timer starts starts counting down from that seven days.

As we can see, this one's deadline is the fifth of July. It's got six and a bit days to go. And when that expires, one of two things can happen.

One is that the if you don't configure anything to happen, cards will get highlighted red as you can see here, and that lets you know if you are overseeing a process that they're basically screaming at you to say, this is past what the think what the deadline you think it should be set you know, it to to go.

What you can also do is and some of our clients do do this, you can configure Gatekeeper to sort of automatically escalate that.

So in some cases, you might wanna say, for especially for, like, time sensitive workflows, like, I think Daniel, did you say a lot of people mentioned that contract renewal reviews are one of their top workflow processes, they're definitely time sensitive if, like, end dates or --

DB: Yeah.JI: -- noticeDB: You definitely wanna escalation phase.

JI: Yeah. You don't want cards to sit for as you can see, this one's forty one days over its SLA deadline. You don't want that to happen on time sensitive processes.

So you can con you can tell Gatekeeper when that when this timer passes its SLA deadline, move it somewhere else, like, give it to an give it to us, you know, a line manager to review or or pass it to the legal team and say, we need to serve notice ASAP or anything really, that fits the way that your organization manages manages it contracts and vendors.LC: Mhmm. James, we actually have a question here from Raj. If I have an external step that needs to be completed as part of the workflow, such as a security assessment can that be can that step be included in this Kanban board?

JI: That is a good question. So it depends on the level of inclusion that they want. So we do definitely have some scope for facilitating external processes.

This template workflow for instance, this interim contract request one has a phase dedicated for something taking place outside the workflow.

So you can see there are two esign phases on this board One where that's taking place in Gatekeeper, in this case, via our DocuSign integration.But we do have clients that say, we want this to happen outside Gatekeeper because maybe our vendor is once used their esign solution, or we need to print it off and sign it physically because that's just how we do things from time to time.

So there there's that's the simple way of doing it. You can have a phase that represents that assessment being taken out of Gatekeeper, and you still leverage the element of Gatekeeper notifying maybe your security assessment team that they need to go and do that and then bring the results back to store them in the system once it's done.

But there's also what some of our clients do from time to time is leverage, you know, clever integrations either via Zapier or the open API to flag that certain contracts or vendors need to have something pushed to an external system, and that's definitely something you can facilitate via Gatekeeper and AutoActions as well.

But that's very advanced for like what we're talking about in the 101 session. Maybe we can maybe we can pick that up in some of the advanced webinar sessions or in answer that in a bit more detail in this knowledge base webinar recording.

DB: James, I'm just picking here. Just just on just on the cards, final bit, really, and the m, the the the b and the b that we can see.

I know I I do think we covered this last time around, but I appreciate not everyone was here when we were covering custom data when we dipped into the fourth, the workflows for the first time.

JI: Yeah. Well, I'll cover I'll cover this ban a bit as well, because I think that's quite cool. But I really need to be able to go about that. The b and the b relate to the vendor that is also associated with this contract record.So it's the case that in this particular Gatekeeper environment, I've enabled our Market IQ suites, our Market IQ Finance which is our Creditsafe integration and Market IQ cyber, which is our SecurityScorecard integration.

And what they allow me to do is via and you can see this on the workflow card level, when you connect vendors to them in your repository and you can do it on workflows as well, get an at a glance indication basically of the risk level of the financial standing and the cybersecurity standing of that particular vendor that we're signing the contract with.

And it's it's especially handy for vendor onboarding workflows, but it's a nice value add in these contract ones as well.Because from an oversight perspective, I can see how healthy or low risk that relationship is going to be. By those indications there.

And if I hover over them, I can see cyber rating eighty two financial rating is low risk. So that that's basically what they give you once you have a vendor that's connected to those modules.

And then this right here,

DB: James, I was just looking to add, like, you you made a really good point. Right? Like, like these may come from like a vendor onboarding process, but they are useful here.And a lot of the time when you think about it, the contract team may very well be different to the vendor management, the procurement, whatever you're called when you deal with your vendors or suppliers within your business.

There's so many names now.

JI: Yeah.

DB: But legal contracts, contract management, they wanna know, like, what is the risk profile of this vendor, especially around, like, cyber and financial stability because --

JI: Yeah.

DB:-- you could then change the clauses in the contracts. So it, like, really helps, like, get your your mind ready for what you need to to redline.

JI: Exactly. It's not just having the data there. It's using it. I think you'd spoke with this on your Tom Roger's episode of your podcast in year around being smart with the data that you have so you can be monitoring vendors that they're upholding the clauses that you've built in and also knowing what closest, you need to be adding to your agreements and what checks you need to have there.So, yeah, that's definitely definitely a good point to raise that that's not just a vendor management due diligence thing, it can carry over to other areas of the system.

So this very much contract focused, legal, may may be focused process. It's still getting that information even though they aren't necessarily the ones performing the due diligence checks.

DB: Yeah. Yeah. Definitely.

JI: And this final bit, I just want to quickly highlight, because I don't wanna spend too long on the card level either.

It's just a banner that gives a bit more information around a very specific process.

So this this could have also been a awaiting gate key pre sign banner because both of them work in in workflows, but it's the case that if you are including a signature process, in your Gatekeeper workflows, you get a nice banner here indicating how far that is through the process as well.

So this would be If this was on over on a done column, it would say, you know, DocuSign completed and it'd be a nice green green banner to let us know what's what's happened there.But this just lets you know what what the card is waiting on. When it sat in this eSign phase, that it hasn't just been sat there and and ignored by Lucy for for however long it's been there.

We know that she has sent this out for Yeah. For forty seven days.

But she has sent it out, and it's just a waiting signatures. So this is a nice status banner that's just a bit added on to workflow cards.

DB: Yeah. That's good. We we we have got a question that's just come in around Market IQ side, but I'm just gonna propose we hold that to the end for that question.

We'll come back to the end just like just whilst we're in the flow just on these workflow cards, we can jump in a little bit more and we'll circle back to that assignment at the end for you.

JI: Okay. Alright. So that that's the high level bits of a workflow, like the the key building blocks to start with when you're considering a process.

The process end to end the phases that represent all of the different steps that you need to build into it, and then the considerations around cards moving through it. Basically, they're the component parts.There are some extra bits. Obviously, we wanna quickly cover them off that make up a workflow. And for that, I'll jump back to this workflow too to talk about let me just move this one back here.

Talk about the first value add bit in my and in my opinion, this is the best why, like, the best selling point of workflows, and it's the form.

So opening up a card here, you can see I've got, like, two form sections. And basically, this is one of the key elements of what Workflows give you in terms of that control pillar that we talked about right at the top of the call.

So and let me just click out of the card to sort of hover over a few other areas of the system.

So we've talked about restore visibility, and whether it's Gatekeeper that you've done this in or another contract management solution, if there is an element of work that goes into making sure that your contracts and vendor repository has all the documents, the data, and the custom fields are all fleshed out how you want them.

Everything's organized with the appropriate stakeholders compiled.One thing that you wouldn't want after doing all the work to get all your central source of truth representing the truth is that any user in the system can just start going to your repository and adding data and adding documents and editing things willy nilly.

What Workflows give you via forms like this is the ability to have users collaborate and make sure that cards go through an appropriate process making sure the right people are checking over the data, the right people are approving it, all the appropriate documentation that that complements it is being compiled.Before it makes its way into your repository. And and obviously, I say make its way in like, it's a new record, but the other side coin is, and a lot of people here mentioned that they use contract renewal workflows, is that they also help maintain that data as well.

So if you do have your contract end dates and your contract termination dates captured in your repository, you'll want that to be maintained so that, you know, in a year's time after doing that work to update your repository, they aren't all just showing is overdue.

You want a process to make sure that the appropriate stakeholders are viewing the form data, updating it to represent the accurate and the the current state of affairs, and that's what workflow forms allow you to do.

And, Daniel, you're really hot on this one because this one was a big one for you. There's there's some other value ads outside of that oversight perspective and control of the repository that work for the forms allow you to do.

So for instance, if I was requesting a new contract on this workflow with Atlassian, this was a bad example, because Atlassian doesn't have any data.

Never works when you want it to, does it? Because if I was requesting a new contract with Atlassian, it was because it was an existing card in the data There we go. No worries.

You can see because this vendor has previously already been on board onboarded, and we've collected things like their registered address, their legal trading name, things like that, an end user wouldn't have to spend so long on data entry each time, which definitely for the for, you know, particular users might be one of those barriers to you know, engaging with a system.

If it's just a lot of extra work each time, like filling out the vendor name, filling out a relatively basic information that for the most part you might already have, forms can allow you to to streamline a bit of that.

So in this case, you can say, it's Atlassian, then when then they come out to the come down to the fill out Details are on their contract. Atlassian's already there. Some of the fields, we can we can already, like, hard code to say that that, like, end users shouldn't have to be thinking about what status and approval rating a contract is being given at the outset.

They just have to fill in the bits that are relevant to that specific agreement before they kick off a process.

DB: Yeah. That's a is it it's a good one. Right?Because I know we were talking about this yesterday, because, like, whenever I got a contract request in, like, I honestly want to have all the vendor information there, mainly because I'll have to put a load of that information into the contract for what.

JI: Yeah.

DB: And and I know we're not going to talk about it. We could use Gatekeeper to help populate templates and things like that. Yeah.But we're getting ahead of ourselves there.

A bit like it's just a really easy way for me to then deal with that and a lot of the the legal people that are probably on this call and elsewhere.

That's probably what they're using it for. And just to depend on how you work, whether you're quite sequential or maybe working a bit more agile.

I like I wanna figure out, like, which whereabouts in the in the, like, the vendor onboarding or due diligence phase is that vendor at.

So when request comes in and I've got that information now. I can just quickly click through and double check in seconds. It's it's super useful just to tie tie workflows together in that in that way as well.

JI: That's a really good point.And that is quite an advanced one to to just drop in on this one zero one session, but it's definitely Yeah. I know. Okay.

Because because I've been using the term, like, end to end process that, you know, encompasses say this contract request workflow, but we definitely do have clients that whilst they're getting the contract negotiated, we'll probably be getting the vendor onboarded separately, completing due diligence assessments.

And you you spoke about this. I'm dropping your podcast in again, but you spoke about this on your Datadog podcast episode where that Head of Supply Management.

Yeah. Where she talked about the fact that she all she always had legal be checking the contract over whilst they were doing due diligence assessments just because it it shortens that time to value for end users.

So they can and they can see lots of processes being done in tandem. In their software solutions, and it just it gets that extra buy in from users when they see everything's everything's running smoothly.

Things can be things that are can be running parallel are, So yeah. We've only really looked at individual Kanban boards so far, but, yeah, you definitely can run processes in parallel if that's something you want to consider.Cool. And so onto the next bit. So we talked about forms, and that's one of the key bits for me that the the basic bit of control that it gives you, that if you want if someone wants to add a new contract to the repository or get a new vendor relationship in place, they can't just go to the repository and add it.

They have to request it and it has to go through the steps that you as a work for the admins decided are the are the appropriate points before a contract can be classed as live and approved and executed.

And you can build into that and the next bit that I wanna talk about, various tasks.

So task is a fairly generic term, and it's just one and it's intentionally generic because it contains a few different types of thing that you can build into your workflow.

Basically, what that encompasses are, anything that actually is facilitated by a process that takes place on one of these phases. And by that, what I mean is a task could be something as simple as someone else updating the form data.

So like we talked about, you don't wanna make your end users always fill out every single piece of data that you got in there.

Sometimes you might wanna hide things from them that they to avoid clutter in the form because they might not know the answers to it yet, or sometimes you want other people, like, supply relationship managers to be filling information, maybe around supply classifications and risk assessments and so on.

So the most basic task maybe you could have on a workflow is just someone else updating the form, you know, collaborating and iteratively building out the data that's gonna make it into your repository.

Another task could be something like an approval. So we can see all this workflow here basically, the way this one will work is once a user requests a contract, that can be assigned to a particular team or a line manager or something like that, to say of the data that's been submitted and the actual nature of the request, I'm happy for this to proceed and provide that approval so that the card can progress.

And then other tasks are generally quite really useful ones that actually are part of the contract and vendor management, you know, life cycle. So there are ones that are fairly basic.

Like creating contract metadata records or creating vendor meta meta data records or updating them as well.

So taking the data that's been added to the form and then built built up in the form and turning that from just a form record into an actual record in the repository that represents a real agreement, a real vendor.

And then there's extra things as well. So we looked at actually, let me skew across.

We looked at actions like sending contracts out for signature, DocuSign, or Gatekeeper eSign. They're big ones.

But you've also got other bits, and Daniel, you just mentioned these this one the sec the second ago, where you can embed in workflows, parts of the actual contract negotiation cycle.

You can have Gatekeeper generate draft documents, plugging in contract and vendor data in there just to save that bit of time if you if you are using contract templates, and you can have Gatekeeper facilitate the draft versioning and redlining as well, so via what we --

DB: It's a big one.

JI: --negotiate. Yeah. It definitely is.DB: They won't want us to waste time, like, in the file name.Like, version one point one zero zero zero version -- I know. -- clean. It's like like, I spent way too much of my career just doing Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.Like, the the the double final one. So, yeah, you can literally just call these these documents whatever you want, and it deals with version control.

It's It's a great one. And, like, just James I was just gonna add, like, something I find really useful.It's just, like, converted documents from, like, words, PDF, which is great like you don't have to worry about doing stuff like that yourself, yeah, creating contract templates is a really good one and. And I know you mentioned it straight away. Like, creating the records. It sounds like such a minor thing. But, like, before you go into like, before you bring a platform in?

Like, how are you doing that normally? You typically will have some sort of tracker, maybe a SharePoint site that has stuff. But you don't actually, like, have this tangible record. You have stuff that belongs to a record in multiple places, kind of how we showed with that that one slide near the start.

So, yeah, big fan of tasks within a Gatekeeper or actions as we call them here.

JI: Yeah. And then I guess the final piece since we're talking about actions is what ties the whole Gatekeeper like workflow, Kanban methodology together, and that's what we call transitions.And this one, again, sounds super simple, but it's it's so powerful when you think about it. And that's let me jump back to that really, like, prototype workflow to to show you like the the opposite of what having transitions in place does.

If you have a Kanban board where you have phase representing your processes or your statuses of cards, the old school way of using these would be, like, once when it's ready to be done, you drag it over and move it to where it is. Or like what the current status is.

The way that Gatekeeper workflows function is all that users need to be aware of is what they have to do, and by completing that action, Gatekeeper will route the card to where it needs to go.

So for instance, if these final approvals are can are collect it against this event services agreement, no one has to then come in and drag the card over to the eSign stage, the collection of those approvals will mean that Gatekeeper automatically routes it to where it needs to go.

And that's just one of those really nice points that means that, you know, it is streamlining it is streamlining your processes because you don't need to worry about, like, oh, this one's in this phase, but I know this person completed their task, so I can drag it over.

It's just You you configure your phases, you configure what needs to be done there.

And when people do their tasks, cards will move through on their own, starting on the left hand side where they begin the process, collecting their data, collecting their documents, and completing their approvals and and other tasks until they end up on one of the the done phases that you configure for your work.

And in this template, we have a done rejected, where things don't go so well and, like, contract negotiations break down. But, you know, ideally, your con your workflow should be ending with things the contract's been executed, the vendor's been onboarded, things like that.

So that's the that's the key bit that ties it all together. You have all those component parts of what you use to see and what they do. But Gatekeeper handles moving cards through the process as people complete their tasks.

DB: Yeah. James, like, I know, like, I appreciate where, like, we're keeping it simple. I'm just gonna just add, like, just a little sprinkling on top, like, just I know like a bunch of people on this call will probably have, like, oh, for like certain vendor types, perhaps a different team or different set of people view them or like different contract types like maybe some are dealt with within procurement and some go to legal and you can really set it up so like depending on the contract type or vendor type, it can go to like those different people on different phases.As well, like, you can break it out and really customize it however you need to. So it's just I love transitions.

Like, there's nothing worse than, like, having someone within your team have to, like, manually force the process along.

JI: Mhmm.DB: And, like, know we haven't spoken about it in this session, but like you can set up like notifications that get sent out or emails and like you can really get these actions and tasks that we have with transitions to get your vendors or stakeholders doing stuff for you without you having to just to write another email, craft another message, we can, like, put some automation around that to to speed things up.

JI: Yeah. That's a good point on the different transitions, sending things to different teams and so on. Because was it you that taught me the term de minimis?

There there was a work that I was building where, basically, yeah, that that sort of thing came up where and it's very common for workflows to have different transitions that fire depending on the scope of the contract or the risk of the vendor, things like that. And a lot of our clients do build that in.

So de minimis is one that just, strike to mind, because I thought you were the one that taught me that word for basically Maybe maybe.

We had what we I've wasn't you, then Daniel, but I had one client that built a workflow where if the value was low enough and if it was with a pre approved vendor and, like, if it met certain, you know, risks know, if it was under certain the risk thresholds, it could skip a few of the approval and negotiation steps because they didn't wanna waste their time on it, basically, was was the --

DB: Yeah.

JI: -- was the reasoning behind it. But you can build different pathways through the same process to, I, essentially, fast track particular cards or, you know, slow what's the opposite of fast track or take them through the long route, like like you've highlighted if if they need extra--

DB: Proportionality. Right? Like, proportional to like the risk, the value, whatever however you are you risk rate or rate your your vendors, the contracts.You can just you can build it out in in that manner, which is great.

JI: Mhmm.

DB: Awesome. Is that everything that we were going to cover?

JI: That's for the 101. Yeah.

LC: Yeah. For those for the basics. Just to stop you guys before you start nerding out too hard in all the advanced functionalities.But, yes, just so that way, we keep everything very simple for the one hundred and one for today. But we will go more into detail on other features and functionalities of workflows.

So, everyone who's attending, don't worry, we will go into more details for those.

If we do have any other additional questions, please feel free to send them in now. We do have one last poll here just to see what everyone is interested in for our future workflow related webinars.

So we will have a couple more in the future, so feel free to kind of just tick whichever ones interest you.

And and we'll wait for some questions that comes in as as well.

DB: Yeah. I know we we kind of don't know how long this this control series will all last, and to be completely open about that, because there's probably depending on how much we decide to show, like, in these sessions, it could go on for quite a while.

And I kinda have the conservative estimate that we could be doing this for twelve months this this year. So let let's let's let's just see.I think if we really wanna jump into it, we could we could show you some really cool stuff to really optimize your workflows and then get you just doing this yourselves and affect really like how I see it is like, if everyone that's on these calls can become affecting you like an admin user, they're super confident using Gatekeeper, like it just makes your life easier just to make those ad hoc changes or just try stuff out.

Like I used to just try stuff out, break stuff, break stuff a lot whilst you're playing around with it and just see how can we eke out any improvement.

So it's a it's a good thing to learn for sure.

LC: Well, let me end this poll here, it seems like we have a couple of results. They're all sure of the results for everyone.

DB: That's cool.

LC: Workflow actions best practice workflows.DB: Approvals as well has a lot here and I feel like That's a really solid one. Right. Like, when we think about, like, the three pillars, what's the final one? It's safeguard compliance.Showing that you have a really solid review and approval process built into everything you do, it's a really good way to especially if you get audited to show, like, we're actually doing stuff where we're following what we said we would do in these policies or to you in our last audit.

It's a really easy way to prove it, especially with our life cycle used within Gatekeeper on the the vendor of contract records. So yeah. That's cool to see. We can definitely cover all of this, for sure.

And Lucy, I was just going to say, like, we did just have a question to come in, and I can just direct this at at yourself James. So don't know who this is.

This one is anonymous, but the question is, I primarily need to build a workflow to send out a new agreement to all my vendors to be DocuSigned.Thanks for the question. And my original thoughts were, like, the contract sort of. The almost like the workflow you were just showing is ideal, but, like, just thinking a bit wider than that.

Like, we've got the best practice, contract review, signature, workflow.

That could be a good one. That you can get us out fairly quickly on that.

JI: The the word that stands out there is all So like Oh, yeah. Yeah.Yeah. How many they have? Yeah. Imagine if there's like a thousand, like, if you to be fair, you know, there there are ways you can do things like that in bulk, but if you if it was let's say a thousand vendors, you wouldn't wanna be reviewing or having someone like a human check each one of those and approve it.

But because of, like, the bit that we mentioned around Touchless and, you know, you've hinted it this a couple of times. I can tell you wanna show it, Daniel, but because of the way that contract templates and the publishing, like, i.e. converting of those those templates from word to PDF and then sending that free sign can all be automated. It is definitely possible to send an agreement out to all vendors. I think I did have a client do this once.

They needed a new DPA because they were changing regions that they operated from. Yeah. Yeah. It's a thousand, by the way, there's over a thousand.

DB: Like, I'm just gonna say, like, get in contact with your c s your your customer success manager after this call as well, basically, we can help you with this because we can definitely make this this possible and really help you out with this.Yeah, like, your point there, like, oh, suddenly we change region or we'd, like, change data center or we like, a new piece of regulation comes in.

Like, these are, like, the really problematic things that any procurement or contract manager doesn't wanna see because you suddenly have to drop everything to to get these going. But, yeah, we can certainly get this sorted.

Yeah. But, yeah, I read, like, your point of, like, templates. I mean, the Touchless setup could be a really, really easy way.
To free build that take automatically.

JI: All of it. Yeah.

DB: Yeah. Yeah. That's a good one.LC: We have another one in from Paula. If a phase in a workflow gets rejected for missing critical information, can the owner go back in and update the card I had a user mention that the fields have a lock icon next to them.JI: Yeah. They can. So that workflow that I was sharing before the people that, like, been were eagle eyed might have spotted it, that the contract request workflow had an element built built into it. There was there was a phase called review rejection where if something was wrong with a submission or, you know, clarity was needed.A card could be sent back and reassigned to the owner to say, try again. If the if the field that Paula is highlighting is showing a locked icon. It could just speak to that phase not being configured properly in the form tab. That's another one that yeah.

Reach out to your CSM.

DB: Yeah.

JI: To go through it with you because it sounds like in the that particular phase, the way the form has been configured there, does it might have been set to read only rather than editable.So you might wanna read just retool that depending on what you wanna give to that user who's accessing it again.

DB: I've had that I had that happen to me. Like, when I first that that were, like, someone pressed reject, it came back and we just didn't have -- JI: Mhmm.

DB: -- the settings again for when that that happened. So, yeah, quite an an easy fix thankfully.

Yeah. Cool. I'm just seeing. Lucy, were there any other questions that we had there?

LC: Oh, another one came in. May all admin move cards. Oh, sorry, may all admin, move cards to the end of the workflow.I've been able to, but others have not. And this came in from Brenda.

JI: They all should if you're a workflow admin yeah. So, I guess, admin can mean different things depending on where you're an admin in Gatekeeper. If you're a workflow admin, yes, you can move cards. If you're just an admin in the repository side.

DB: Could you show the user settings just to show which one --

JI: Yeah.

DB: --and the user settings needs to be checked off to enable the yeah.

JI: Yes. Sure.

DB: You can be an admin without being a workflow admin.

JI: Exactly. So when the the initial setting of setting up a user, you have whether they are an admin or a collaborator role, so ignore these bits for now.And that pertains to what they can do in the repository. And when they're looking at records, can they add, can they edit, can they delete.

However, the there's additional permissions down here, and this is specifically workflow admins, can they build workflows, can they edit them, and can they move cards around the workflow board using that control function?

So it might be that the the person who asked this question can do that because they have the this permission their colleagues can't because they need to be given this.

Obviously, you have to have that decision of, like, should they be given this?

But that's that's the permission you need to be able to move cards around the board.

DB: Fortunately, it's all tracked regardless. So if you do give it to someone and they move it like it's gonna show up on the life cycle tab of that that card. So hopefully, alleviate any trust concerns there.

JI: Yeah.

DB: Awesome. James, one just came in from Simon.

Do you have a video walkthrough of how to set up a workflow and take it through to completion examples could be NDA and contract and I know you've been working on a bunch of walkthroughs. 

JI: How to set-- Yeah. So I guess we do have these for the best practice templates for sure.

So the Touchless NDA, for instance, if you did want to use that Touchless form that allows external parties to preview the terms and self register, you know, taking some of that data about been work off your hands.

That has a knowledge base guide, and you can get to that from just going to the knowledge base instead.

DB: Can you show it again?

JI: Okay.

DB: Show it. Show it. Like like just like know people seem so visual. Like, to go through to the workflow area is a good way to show this one.

JI: So so if you're a workflow administrator, when you go add, you can either build your workflow campaign board from scratch just using workflow, or if you go workflow template, this is where our best practice templates library is.

And Touchless NDA is down here in the bottom right, but what this also has First off, you can create the template, but hitting setup guide will take you through to the knowledge base article that has some explanation as to what the workflow does. It will they'll also have in some cases like a walk through of the user experience.

And they also have configuration steps like how to add this to your Gatekeeper environment, how to configure the necessary steps to to fill in the gaps.

So, basically, this one will say, this is how you you need to add your contract template because we can't build your NDA template for you, things like that.So, yeah, we have knowledge base guides for for some of these.
Based on the template you want to use, and there are obviously other knowledge based articles that cover off some of the 101 bits we talked about today like phases and form access and building workflow forms, things like that.

Yeah. I I like I just think that if you're if you're thinking about set up a a new process, and the best practice workflows are a really good way just to get started even if they're going to slightly differ from perhaps how you're doing things now.

Like you can see the process maps that we've built and what we've based it on within these these setup guides in the knowledge base, and you can just there's steps further on in those those guides to show you, like, maybe you need to add a different review phase or maybe you get rid of a phase and add one of your own and it shows you how to tie the transitions together.

So, yeah, hopefully, that will be will be helpful for you there, Simon.

LC: And one more from Michelle, if the life cycle avatars don't have a name when you hover over them. Is that an AI within Gatekeeper?

DB: Is this thing on the card? That's the. only-

JI: Is this a workflow?

LC: Yes.

DB: Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Sure. So on So as in yeah. Let's get one up and sure Michelle might comment as we're we're doing this.

JI: So I assume does she mean the the life cycle here?If it doesn't have an avatar, does she mean the history or the life cycle? That's a good question.

Yes, the contract. James on the workflow card, some of them don't have an avatar. It's normally because they're assigned to a team or not assigned. Right?

So we go to yeah.

JI: Yeah.

DB: On the Kanban. Right? Yeah. So it yeah.

JI: Exactly. If Lucy hadn't been assigned, to this card, you'll get like an empty set icon that shows that no one's assigned, but you can also get this this generic picture that shows that it could be a team, it could be multiple teams start just one individual.

DB: It's only a person where it's one individual person that has been either pre assigned to you or now like if you went back the Q3 project delivery one that Lucy was just on assigned Lucy or someone else to, it would show their face.JI: Definitely. Yeah.

DB: Yeah.Yeah. Yeah. So if you have lots of teams as opposed to individuals, yeah, absolutely.And I almost feel like that's probably like the majority here will probably just have it route to a team and then you'll assign it whoever's leading that team will assign it to whoever best place for it. So it's fairly common there for sure.

LC: Alright. Perfect. I think that's all the time that we have for today. But if anybody has any other questions, feel free to email or reach out to your CSM. They'll be able to answer any questions.And we will be having our next workflow webinar next month. We'll send out email communications and everything for that, but thank you so much, James, and Daniel.

And we'll see you guys all next month.

DB: Yeah. Thanks to everyone for coming on and listening to James and I nerd out about workflows. I know that.Appreciate it. Yeah.

JI: Thanks, guys.

LC: Bye, everyone.

DB: Bye.
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