Agiloft — For those with Lofty Ambitions for Contract Management Agility

Agiloft is another rare breed in the Supply Management space. It’s ancient (as it was founded in 1991, only a year after the first web browser was invented), it was founded to be a back-office B2B enterprise application (and their main offerings are service desk, workflow & business process management, and contract management), it’s debt-free, it has a large network of resellers, it has multiple global hosting locations (to support local privacy laws or government & military security requirements), and you can have it anyway you want: pure (low-cost) multi-tenant SaaS, classic ASP, or even on-premise with your choice of two different platforms (Windows or Linux). [Hint, choose the 2nd.]

Obviously, in this post we are going to focus on the contract management solution, as that is the most relevant to Supply Management, and the related BPM and Workflow elements they have in their Workflow and BPM solution to support it as well as their Asset Management capabilities. While the ability to use a single vendor for multiple “back office” B2B applications might be attractive to some organizations, our specialty here at Sourcing Innovation is Supply Management and Supply Technology Innovation, and that’s what we will cover.

The contract management solution supports contract creation, negotiation, approval and renewal. It contains a searchable central repository with double-byte language support and automatic audit trail for regulatory compliance, clause libraries, Word templates, and Word integration. In addition to Word integration, it also provides a complete API and and bi-directional pre-built integration with systems such as AD, SAML, Oauth, SSO, SalesForce, MS Exchange, DocuSign, QuickBooks, and Xero.

The contract creation is not only flexible, but so is the complex review and approval routings that can contain a combination of sequential, parallel, and conditional approvals. Agiloft’s ability to create and support complex, customizeable, business processes and workflows make complex creation and approval processes a snap. Furthermore, in addition to complete version history (and automatic redlining), it also supports a complete audit trail of those changes, built in OCR that can process attached image files, and fine-grained security that can control access by user group down to individual fields in a contract record.

It can easily be configured to support any industry and regulatory requirements that the organization has to support (or wants to support) by way of additional data capture, workflow modifications, mandatory checks and required approvals by appropriate risk management personnel. It can also be integrated tightly with asset management and each asset affected by the contract can be correlated with the contract, and each contract that references an asset can be correlated with the asset. This last point is particularly relevant as some assets can be shared across contract if they are only needed for short periods of time (such as excavators on construction projects).

However, as of now, any organization that has regulatory or compliance needs, requirements to track additional types of compliance, insurance, or audit documents has to define the requirements, create tables to track the necessary data and documents, define the relationships, create the monitoring tasks, create the notification templates, hook the notifications up to email, and so on. The wheel has to be re-created in each and every organization that needs to track a specific requirement. The platform needs the ability to capture and store common tasks, workflows, and components in a repository that can be accessed by any and all customers and included in individual instances as needed. Agiloft plans to release a community next year that will allow customers, consultancies, and anyone on the platform to export and share custom capabilities that they have created, and this is a good start, but it would really quicken start up time if this functionality was there.

That being said, the configurability of the solution (and the speed at which it can be configured by their services team) should not be overlooked. Consider the example of Enki(.co). Enki is a cloud services provider that was founded by the former NetSuite CIO and Director of Engineering. They spent 6 man-months customizing NetSuite for contract management, sales, and support, but never realized their vision. They eventually replaced NetSuite with Agiloft, and managed to customize it to their needs in 10 days, going live a week after that. In other words, the platform can be customized to the needs of most organization’s in a matter of weeks, but only by an experienced configurator. (However, once someone in the organization goes through about a week of training with Agiloft, they will learn to maintain and customize the platform at close to the same speed going forward.)

Agiloft is a great fit for those organizations that have some supply management capability (in front end strategic sourcing or back end procurement / procure to pay) but do not have good contract management and need a good CLM tool to serve as a foundation for their Supply Management processes. The ability to define the required contract lifecycle and sync with other platforms makes it a great central system for any organization that does not have, or cannot acquire, a fully integrated source to pay suite (as it can manage workflow across applications).