Gatekeeper Webinar Series: Touchless Contracts

Gatekeeper Webinar Series: Touchless Contracts

Transcript | 31 March 2022

Henal Patel: Hello everybody, and thank you for joining us on our webinar today. My name is Henal Patel and I am one of the Account Executives here at Gatekeeper.

I'm also joined by my colleague, Tom Flanaghan, who is one of our Product Owners and he will also be doing a demonstration for us later today.

So today we'll be looking at some of the common challenges of the contracting process that a lot of companies are experiencing and how Gatekeeper can help you overcome those.

Just a little bit of housekeeping before we get started. If you have any questions during the presentation, please feel free to submit them via our Q&A function.

We'll have some time for questions at the end of the webinar and we’ll also be sending out a recording along with a copy of the slide, in case you need to jump off before the webinar ends.

So there are three goals that I would like us to achieve by the end of today's webinar. 

The first is to understand the significant impact of the current contracting process.

The second is to understand Gatekeeper’s approach versus other providers and partners in the market.

The third is how you can self-serve contracts at scale.

Now, we know from experience that it's easy for lawyers to become very expensive administrators for their companies.

Some examples of low-value work we hear that lawyers are getting bogged down with include, but not limited to, things like data input, record completion, spending a lot of time trying to locate contracts and documents, whether that be in a physical or digital version.

Answering basic questions around the content of the contract, so things like end dates, counterparty information and values, chasing for signatures and also running credit checks, as and when required.

So what we're going to look at today are a couple of examples of the contracting process and how it can be drastically improved, but let's start with a common one, the NDA.

Now I appreciate everyone's NDA process will look a little different, but there are some common characteristics that we see amongst the less efficient versions.

So things like emails going back and forth, manual data entry, which can be prone to error and require correction. Manual third-party credit checks, if required. 

Contract edits with no control. Print, scan, send, repeat. Contracts stored in inboxes. 

No automated downstream contract renewals and no automation of compliance.

So let's take a look at what this process would look like with Gatekeeper.

At Gatekeeper, we came up with the concept of Touchless Contracts, which combines rule-based automation technology with external data feeds. 

We start by sending a secure link to your counterparty that you want to initiate the NDA with. When clicking through, the counterparty is presented with your standard NDA template with data that has been pre-populated based on their email domain.

Once the NDA has been executed via e-Signature, the document is sent back to the internal teams to signature and will follow a credit check, if required.

It also helps to create a centralised database, as well as crucially automating renewals and compliance management.

Touchless Contracts allows your legal teams to remain hands off until their expertise is required.

To give you an overview of Touchless Contracts, Gatekeeper uses unique US patent pending technology, and this will free up your high-value employees to focus on more strategic work.

Create automation for the contract lifecycle process. Automate record generation, enable dynamic document generation with embedded eSign, and centralise counterparty and user records.

So Gatekeeper’s Touchless Contracts operates across three layers in relation to the contracts with the aim of automating compliance.

For each layer, Touchless Contracts helps to automatically capture, enrich and store Key Data points, reducing associated administration to zero.

Let's look at what these layers look like in practice. So we mentioned the secure form earlier, and this is the first part that Gatekeeper takes care of.

The data layer is where you can initiate risk analysis and credit checks for your counterparties.

Set up renewal management obligation tracking and spend analysis based on that contract information.

The document layer is where the processes around the actual documents are taken care of - documents are centralised making them easy to find, full audit trails are created for all activity taken on a particular file and the native e-Signature platform takes care of the execution.

By means of comparison, this is what you can expect to see from some of the other providers in the market. 

No credit checks. No data layer to help you capture renewal management and spend management and often with no native embedded eSign. 

Effectively what is left is the document in a siloed storage.

Gatekeeper’s Touchless Contracts is fully embedded and compatible with all Gatekeeper features, including our eNegotiate, Clause Library, eSign, Employee Portal and Vendor Portal as well.

So for today we're going to be covering two examples, the first being an external NDA request and then we're also going to look at a supplier self-registration process. 

I'll now hand over to Tom, he will walk you through a demonstration.

Tom Flanaghan: Thanks Henal. Okay, so the first use case I'll be taking you through is a very simple one, and one that I'm sure many of you will be familiar with, and that is issuing an NDA.

So in front of me I have a Touchless NDA workflow, which will allow you to issue an NDA for signature, as well as creating the associated records all without requiring any input from your internal users.

And we do this with the use of a Touchless form that the supplier fills out, which you can see here.

So if we just take a look at this for a second, there are three steps that the external user needs to complete before they can submit the document for eSign.

The first one is reviewing the document itself, so here they get a chance to read through the document they'll be signing, all before any records or the document is created.

Once they're happy that they wish to move forward with the signing of the agreement, they can click ‘Generate my Agreement for eSign’.

Next, we're going to fill in our email address. 

In this case, I'm actually going to use a real email to showcase our unique auto-build technology that can auto complete forms, based on a range of third-party data feeds. 

We're going to use someone very well known, which is elon@tesla.com.

This is going to demonstrate this, but I'm sure Elon has enough on his to-do list without us sending him our NDA, so we'll replace this email to one we have access to in the next step. 

So we're going to go ahead and click ‘Find’ here.

That's going to use our third-party data feeds to pull information on Elon, such as his first name, last name and job title and also some details on his company. 

So we're just going to go ahead and replace Elon’s email with one of our aliases, and then we're going to go ahead and hit ‘Submit’.

So what that is doing in the background is creating all of the records required in order to send a document for Elon to sign. If we go ahead and just go back to our workflow and hit refresh.

We can see that we have a card on the eSign phase awaiting the external party signature.

I understand that a lot has happened in a split second so if we take a step back and look at the history of the card to see exactly what has happened after the vendor submitted the form.

We clicked on a card, and we can go straight to our ‘History’ and you'll see that we have a bunch of history records for this card.

Starting with Elon submitting, we can see that once it was submitted, it entered the auto-create contract phase, which created the contract record. 

It then automatically submitted it to create the draft, then to the published draft, and then sent for eSign.

So if we just head back to the ‘Core’, we can see that we have our PDF. We can also view the history of our documents.

As this is a very simple creation of the document published to PDF and sent for signature, we only have two versions, which is the .doc and the .pdf.

We also have a supplier report and a contract record created against the card, so if we go ahead and take a look at those now.

If we go to our supply record, we can see that we have a very basic supply record created with our Elon Musk as the supply manager, we have our registered address set, the legal name set, all pulled through using our third-party data feeds. 

We can see that the status is Pipeline, as they haven't actually signed the NDA yet, and they are awaiting approval. 

If we go ahead and look at the lifecycle of this, we can see that the Touchless Contracts form was submitted, which created the supplier and they were set to Pipeline Awaiting Approval. 

Once they've actually signed the document, we’ll come back to this page as well.

If we just take a look at the contract record. Again, Pipeline against the supplier Tesla. Contract Type is NDA, this time it is Approved, as all our NDAs are automatically approved.

We can also see that we have the dates here as well. So this is actually using our pre-configured rule sets to set the start date to the day the form was completed, and the end date to your desired contract length, in this case we've used one year.

We can also see that we have a master file associated, which is the NDA record created, we can see it's between Gatekeeper and Tesla. 

If we scroll down, we can see that it's already been pre-signed by Patrick, our CEO and we are waiting, the signature of Elon.

If we just scroll up and take a look at the lifecycle view of this contract. Similarly to the supplier, it had the record created from the auto-action on the workflow.

Its contract is set to Pipeline and a draft was created and published and eSign was initiated, and we can see the contract and date as well here.

So we have a full audit trail against the contract record, the supplier record and also the history on the card itself, which details the history of the process.

So if we just go back to the workflow, close that down, and then we'll head back to Elon’s view and we'll go to Elon's inbox. 

So here we can see that we have a new email asking us to sign the document and obviously we're awaiting this email, as we submitted that Touchless form to send us the agreement to sign so we're going to hit ‘Review & eSign’.

This time we’ll notice that we actually have the information populated, such as the supplier name to replace that handlebar there. If we scroll down, we can see that we have the signatures awaiting to be signed, so we can hit ‘Sign Here’.

It's going to automatically generate a signature for us and populate it in the document where we've specified in the handlebars for that template that we use for our NDA. 

We could edit our signature, change the style if we wanted to but I'm happy with the one Gatekeeper’s chosen for me and we're going to hit ‘I Agree’.

So now, if we go back to our internal user, and refresh this page.

We can see that our card has gone to the ‘Fully Executed’ phase, which means it's now completed on a ‘Done’ phase, which means that is the end of this process for this card.

And we can see here that eSign is complete, so if we go ahead and go back to our supplier, we can see that it now has a status of Live and it's also Approved, as the NDA is now executed. 

Likewise, if we go to the life cycle view, we can see that it was automatically updated by the Touchless NDA process and the approval set to Approved and the supply status was set to Live.

And likewise if we go to the contract lifecycle view, we can see that we have some extra steps that have been added to the lifecycle since we last looked. 

We can see that the eSign was completed by Elon, the contract was set to Live and it was updated by that workflow.

And if we go to our Files area, we can see that we have our NDA which is executed and we can also take a look at the history of that eSign as well.

And if we just go back to that Data tab, we can see that we have the Live and Approved contract, but also we have the fully eSigned document available on that Data tab in the preview which is fully searchable as well.

So without any input from our internal user, besides sending the supplier the link to the Touchless form, we have a fully decorated supplier record, fully decorated contract record, an agreement fully executed and signed and an audit trail against each of the records, as well as the process itself.

Okay, so that was the first part of the demonstration, the next use case I'm going to cover off is the Vendor Portal Self-Registration.

Using Touchless Auto-Actions in conjunction with our Vendor Portal and Market IQ data feeds to allow you to onboard your vendors with minimal input required.

So the process is triggered by the vendor self registering to the Vendor Portal. 

This automatically builds the vendor with a Pipeline status in your Gatekeeper tenant and our Market IQ data feeds fully enrich the record with credit metadata, as you can see in the screenshot below.

Once the vendor has self registered to the Portal, this triggers the workflow which will automatically build the contract record, generate the document and send it to them for signature, just like how you saw in the previous demonstration.

Once the vendor has signed the NDA, they then receive an email with a link to fill out the onboarding form, which once complete will be sent to an internal user for review.

And finally, the internal reviewer approves or rejects the vendor, which is the only step that requires any input from an internal user throughout the whole process.

If the vendor is approved the record will be updated to Live and Approved and notified of the approval. Likewise if they're rejected, they will be marked as Archived and Rejected, as well as being notified of any reasons provided by the reviewer.

I'll now hand over back to Henal for a recap, followed by a Q&A.

HP: Thanks Tom. So just to recap, as you will have noticed, we can see the negative impact of a slow and inefficient contracting process that leads to a lot of admin work for your legal teams and your legal professionals.

We've also understood the significant impact of the current contracting process and looked at Gatekeeper’s approach versus some of the other providers in the market and, finally, as Tom just demonstrated how Gatekeeper can facilitate self-serve contracts at scale using our Touchless Contracts.

I'd like to take a minute to pause and answer some of the questions that have come through. If you have any questions, by all means, please feel free to submit them via the Q&A function.

So there's a question that's come through here, which says, is Touchless Contracts an add-on module?

So just to answer that, no, Touchless Contracts is a feature that is available in all Gatekeeper plans at no additional cost.

TF: I can see another one's just come through. There's one which is around our credit check process from our Market IQ data feeds - isn't it a bit overkill to have the credit check process inside Gatekeeper as well? 

Well, we don't think so. By integrating the credit check we're effectively ‘front-loading’ compliance for each vendor.

We ensure that they're under a binding NDA and that major financial risks are covered right at the start of the process, rather than halfway through or towards the end.

This should then ultimately save time across teams by removing the need to engage with any companies that fail to meet the required standard that you're trying to hold.

See there's another one come through, probably best for you to take this Henal, which is, how much does Market IQ cost?

HP: No worries. The starting price of Market IQ is $525 per month. If you are interested in having a demo, please speak to one of our Account Executives. If you are a Gatekeeper customer, please reach out to your Customer Success Manager and we can help you get that arranged.

There's just another one that's come in, which says, what happens when my vendor declines to eSign the document? 

That's a great question. The sender is notified and can edit the eSigners as needed to complete the process.

TF: There's also another one. I'll take this one, which is, how is the pre-signature done from the demonstration. So this is from a few of our customers already.

We have a contract template library, that you can upload your templates to, and you can actually pre-sign these templates and upload them.

So you know they're already pre-approved, so when you send them out they’re already pre-signed by your internal whoever that signatory is, so it only requires an external signature.

HP: There's another one here, it says, often the email address of the contact we are dealing with is not the appropriate signatory for the counterparty. How is that addressed? 

Again, another great question.

We see this quite a lot and it's not just working with the Touchless eSign process. Luckily Gatekeeper can support eSign delegation, meaning that the person receiving the eSign request can simply delegate this on to the appropriate signer if it's not them.

TF: There's also another one around if the user reviewing the document of their Touchless Contracts and they would wish to make edits rather than generate the agreement for eSign.

We do have another configurable option which is available, but wasn't shown in this demonstration, which allows the user to propose changes. 

That will actually send them the document in a .docx form and use our eNegotiate feature to start negotiations, rather than straight for eSign. 

This can still be used in conjunction with the generated agreement for eSign. It will obviously just take a different path compared to straight to eSign.

HP: There's just one here that says, can this be integrated with other ERP and CRM systems? 

The answer is yes, we have a native integration with NetSuite and an open API to facilitate communication with other platforms. 

We also, in terms of CRM, have a native integration with Salesforce as well. So we'll have a chat about that in a bit more detail if that's of interest.

TF: And there’s quite a few more, we’re probably not able to get around to answering all of these now, but I should answer one more though. 

How do we build Touchless Contracts?

It is very simple to build but it's probably best reaching out to your CSM to get some further information on that as well as some Knowledge Base articles and documentation. But it's essentially an extra form access similar to public forums or submit requests, similar to the Employee Portal.

HP: Alright I'm just gonna make sure we've captured all the questions here, so we can provide responses along with a copy of the recording for this webinar as well.

Are there any more questions that we are expecting here just for visibility purposes, and then the last question was around ERP and CRM.

TF: I think that's it. If we have any more come through, we will reach out over email, along with the slides and recording.

HP: All right, thank you so much for joining, and we will be in contact with, as Tom mentioned, the recording and answers to these Q&As as well.

If you would like to find out more about Gatekeeper or arrange a personalised demonstration, please get in touch today.