Contract Management Case Study: The Telegraph Media Group

Customer Profile

Company - The Telegraph Media Group
Description - The Telegraph is an award-winning, multimedia news brand that has been synonymous with quality, authority and credibility for more than 160 years. It publishes both the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph broadsheet newspapers.
Location - London, UK
Size - Revenue £285m (2017), Circulation 363,000 (Daily Telegraph only, Dec. 2018)
Key Stakeholders for Gatekeeper - Procurement and In-house legal teams.

Summary

The Telegraph’s key pain points all related to a lack of central visibility of the business’s contracts. This meant:

• The Procurement Team was unable to strategise and save costs across the whole vendor set.
• Contracts were auto-renewing each year without oversight.
• Financial and regulatory risks couldn’t be calculated accurately or mitigated effectively.

Both the Procurement and Legal Teams were also having to deal with a high volume of requests for basic information about existing contracts from stakeholders. This was severely limiting the time they could spend on value-adding activities.

Why Gatekeeper?

• Visibility: Clear dashboards showing contract values, key dates and obligations, meaning timely reminders for renewals and the ability to identify business risk
• Scale & Flexibility: Gatekeeper’s solution offers unlimited users which, in a business of the Telegraph’s size, allows for all stakeholders to have relevant, secure access.
• Support & Expertise: Commitment to future product development to further align with the Telegraph’s stated goals and broaden the user base within their business.

The full story

The reasons for the Telegraph coming to market are typical of a lot of Gatekeeper’s customers.

With agreements being stored in multiple locations across email accounts, shared drives and other internal systems, they were unable to gain a consolidated view of their contract spend and obligations.

This was not only making it difficult for Procurement teams and Legal Teams to fulfil their primary roles of controlling costs and minimising business risks, it was also leading to multiple distractions in the form of ad hoc requests from their stakeholders for contract information.

“A significant amount of time each week was being devoted to what amounted to basic administrative tasks, tying up valuable internal resource” says Paul Wilkinson, Procurement and Partnerships Manager at Telegraph Media Group.

In a business of the Telegraph’s size and breadth, the opportunities for unnecessary spend are significant. With thousands of live contracts at any one time, managing renewals effectively was particularly challenging, especially without central oversight of key dates and ownership.

The result of this was often missed renewals, or auto-renewals of agreements that were no longer required. 

Similarly, if left unchecked, the potential financial and regulatory risks arising from poor contract management are also substantial.

This combination of factors brought the Procurement and Legal Teams to market to find a solution that could not only provide the central visibility to them but which could also provide delegated access to their stakeholder group.

They would then be able to monitor and optimise their contract universe, while their colleagues could self-serve for their more basic requests.

Gatekeeper was the solution chosen to provide the answer to all of these problem areas.

“We could immediately see how Gatekeeper was going to save us time, whilst giving us the overall visibility of our contracts necessary for consolidation and optimisation of our supplier relationships” continues Paul.

Cost Savings

Since having Gatekeeper in place, clear opportunities for cost-savings have been identified in a number of areas.

Firstly, the number of missed renewals for contracts captured correctly in Gatekeeper reduced to zero, meaning a tighter control on costs.

Secondly, the ability to visualise and group costs has led to opportunities for consolidation.

One example of this is spend with recruitment agencies for sourcing new staff.

The Telegraph has a preferred supplier list for recruiting but following the implementation of Gatekeeper was able to quickly identify a significant amount of spend to agencies not on that list.

This then triggered enquiries with relevant internal departments to determine the reasons for using non-approved agencies. It subsequently also highlighted areas where the preferred-supplier list was deficient and needed expanding.

This has helped drive down recruitment costs, whilst improving overall quality of the approved supplier list.

Risk Mitigation

The review of recruitment partners also provided an opportunity to strengthen the compliance protocols around bringing on new contractors.

As with most large businesses, the Telegraph employs a significant number of contractors. Ensuring that their recruitment partners have conducted the necessary due-diligence is vital to mitigating a variety of risks.

With Gatekeeper, it’s easy to record that commitment against their supplier record, which then helps with compliance and reporting.

If any documentation or process needs updating periodically, automatic reminders can be set to trigger these actions.

Time Savings

Implementing Gatekeeper has also saved both the Legal and Procurement Teams significant amounts of time spent with ad-hoc requests for contracts.

By delegating access, with appropriate permissions, throughout their business their stakeholders can access contract documents for themselves.

This has significantly reduced the number of “can you pull this contract for me?” requests that they have to deal with on a weekly basis.

This gives time back to the Procurement and Legal team to focus on the tasks that actually require their specialist expertise.

The Future

“With an established implementation in place at the Telegraph we are very excited to be working with the team there to roll out further features to help them get even greater value from their investment.” says Patrick O’Connor, Director at Gatekeeper.

“These new features have been carefully designed and built with several of our enterprise-level customers in mind and we’re excited to get them into their hands.”

To see how Gatekeeper can help your business save costs, mitigate risks and unlock more value from your contract agreements, get in touch today.