Contract Management Case Study - Mollie

“The mission of our legal team is to ensure that all aspects of Mollie’s business stay in control...With the implementation of Gatekeeper, our team has been able to create a clear overview and assist all parts of the business to maintain that control” - Sarah Roberto, Legal Counsel.

Business Name: Mollie
Location: Amsterdam, Netherlands
Description: Mollie is a payment services provider which helps businesses of all sizes to sell and build more efficiently with a solid but easy-to-use payment solution. It currently employs around 160 people.
Key Stakeholders for Gatekeeper: In-house Legal Counsel

Summary

Rapid growth at Mollie was putting pressure on the Legal Team to maintain control over its contract portfolio and to manage contract risk effectively. A lack of clearly-mandated procurement and sign-off processes meant that an increasing number of contracts were either slow to be signed, or signed and then stored in an unstructured way.

This was costing the business money, wasting time and increasing future business risk.

It became clear to the team at Mollie when they began the process of trying to centralise their contracts that what they required was a dedicated Contract Management Software.

They reviewed several solutions but Gatekeeper stood out by offering the clearest path to putting the Legal Department back in control by automating their contracting processes and bringing order to their team’s interactions with the rest of the business.

Naturally, Gatekeeper also ticked the boxes of central repository storage, clear and accurate reporting and secure access, which would also bring considerable benefit to the wider business. But the key differentiator was the ability to use the dedicated Kanban Workflow Engine to automate and optimise the various sign-off and contract renewal processes.

Gatekeeper has delivered against this key objective and brought order and scalability to these complex processes. Not only is manual work vastly reduced, but the solution has also increased visibility of contract relationships throughout the business.

This has meant opportunities for cost consolidation across suppliers and teams have been easy to identify and action.

Why Gatekeeper?

1. Automation of contract sign-off processes. With relatively little structure around their sign-off processes, the Legal Team at Mollie were finding it increasingly difficult to stay in control of the contract portfolio as the company grew. The ability to digitise and standardise these processes, using Gatekeeper’s workflow engine was considered the key differentiator when assessing different solutions.
   
   
2. Central source of truth. Bringing all of Mollie’s contracts together so that a coherent strategy could be applied was crucial. With an unknown number of contracts being stored in employee email accounts and personal drives the Legal Team were unable to manage contract risk effectively. Once the contracts were uploaded into Gatekeeper, the total picture becomes clear.
   
   
3. Total visibility. It was important to be able to share the contract information with the wider team at Mollie so that they could all review their respective contracts and make informed decisions about supplier relationships. Gatekeeper provides the data in easy-to-digest summaries as well as at an individual contract level. Secure access controls also help maintain confidentiality between teams and users.
   
   

The Full Story

Fast-scaling organisations experience a range of growing pains, as previously-adequate internal systems and processes come under pressure.

Several of these pains relate to a business’s contracts and reflect the fact that as more contracts are signed, by more people, if there aren’t robust processes in place then it becomes very difficult to track the status of every contract in the business.

Mollie came to market for a contract management solution in early 2019 having begun to experience these common issues. Specifically, these included:

• Having no centralised place where contracts were consistently stored. The combination of incomplete Excel spreadsheets and contracts being stored within employee email accounts or personal drives made it impossible for the Legal Team to have a clear view of all the business’s relationships.
  
  
• No consistent, documented sign-off process for new contracts which would lead to delays when it came to initially getting contracts agreed and confusion later when it came to renewals.
  
  
• No systematic way to track whether contract obligations were being met during the term of the business’s contracts.

Working closely with their in-house legal team, together we identified the two key areas that Gatekeeper would help them to address:

1. To create the central repository for their contract documents, which would bring them visibility of all the business’s commitments, including ongoing obligations and renewals.
   
   
2. To define and automate their procurement and sign-off processes for all their contracts.
   
   

The Legal Team had correctly identified the lack of clear procedures around contracts as a source of business risk and sought the right technology to address it.

The team at Mollie were impressed from the first engagement with Gatekeeper:

“Gatekeeper was super hands-on and really made an effort to understand why we needed them and the ways in which Gatekeeper could help. That was really different from the other solutions we were considering initially.” said Sarah Roberto, Legal Counsel.

When weighing up which solution would be the best fit for Mollie, the team naturally looked at comparative costs and user experience to help make the decision.

However, the real differentiator they were looking for was a partner that they were confident could help them build and optimise their approval processes. And that’s why they picked Gatekeeper.

Throughout the implementation period, which the team at Mollie described as “phenomenal”, building these approval process from scratch was the main focus.

Using Gatekeeper’s Kanban Workflow Engine, the dedicated Customer Success Manager worked closely with the Mollie team to digitise and automate their desired processes.

Of the result, Sarah said:

“The solution really exceeded our expectations, this is especially true of the workflows. We were able to implement a totally customised workflow that truly reflects our procurement process and that’s been the biggest impact for us. There is better alignment within different teams on what they need to review and that greatly assists with time management.”

The benefits of centralising and visualising contract data have also been realised not just in the Legal Team but throughout the business. Different departments have been able to review their contracts and associated costs and make informed decisions about whether certain suppliers represent value for money or whether there are opportunities for cost consolidation.

“We really enjoy seeing our customers unlock the full value of their contract data” says Patrick O’Connor, Director at Gatekeeper. “And we invest heavily in the development of our Customer Success Team to ensure they’re more than just experts at implementing our software. They will work to understand our customers’ requirements in detail and bring strategic as well as practical support to them.”

By fully digitising their processes and centralising their data, Mollie’s Legal Team have also given themselves a great platform from which to help grow the business. Automated sign-offs are fully scalable and remove significant amounts of manual work from the day-to-day running of the team.

The team at Gatekeeper are excited to help support them as their business continues to thrive.

For more information about how Gatekeeper can help fast-growing businesses to scale effectively, contact us today. Or you can read our related article - The Case For Contract Management in Startup Businesses.