Manpowergroup's journey to successful contract management
About Åse marie Haugstulen
Åse is the Director of the Bid Team at ManpowerGroup, which means she has overall responsibility for ensuring that ManpowerGroup's offered deliveries and prices are unbeatable in the Norwegian market. She has climbed the ranks in the company, starting as a temp worker herself more than 20 years ago. With the combination of extensive operational experience and a strong strategic overview, they could hardly have chosen a better person to lead the work towards improved contract management.
ABOUT manpowergroup
Recruitment and staffing agency ManpowerGroup's companies in Norway and Sweden are giants in their industry, with a combined turnover of over 8 billion Norwegian kroner. On a regular day, more than ten thousand people are leased to customers. In addition, they carry out thousands of direct recruitments throughout the year, where the quality of the skills they find is crucial for the further development of their customers.
“We thought we had a sufficient overview, but now we have registered more than 900 agreements, far more than we expected. We have also established better processes. Contract management has become a natural part of the planning within procurement and sales.”
- Åse Marie Haugstulen, Director of the Bid Team at ManpowerGroup
Background
With ManpowerGroup’s size and type of business, there comes a large number of agreements. There are agreements with all customers, agreements that regulate deliveries, and agreements with all suppliers.
Beyond size, complexity generically arises in the agreements. Because: ManpowerGroup has proximity to customers. This involves a broad geographical presence with many offices. And it means that they have specialized and legally separate subsidiaries, internally known as brands – to meet the diverse needs of customers.
Challenges
“As our business grew, we discovered that we were lacking software to support how we managed ongoing client contracts. Only parts of the employees had access to the contracts, and then only reader access. Moreover, the brands had different contract management practices.”
“At the same time, the procurement department was using Excel sheets and Sharepoint solutions. All this complexity and our sub-optimal response, meant we didn’t have processes and systems in place to support the way we were moving forward as a company.”
Process
“We needed to collaborate not only between brands, but also between geographies and cross national borders. And we needed the systems to support this. To this end, we established a project team, and started by sketching all the relevant processes. Our scope was to implement a contract management system that supported our sales, delivery and procurement processes.”
“We conducted a thorough vendor assessment, and we had multiple requirements. The contract management software had to be able to support all our brands in terms of sales and deliveries, in addition to being a tool for the procurement teams. The software had to allow contracts to be shared across national borders. And it had to fulfill ManpowerGroup’s global IT and legal governance requirements.”
Improvements
“I believe we have reasons to be proud of what our new routines are accomplishing. All our brands in Norway and Sweden are currently using Complete Control. All employees can read contracts, and access is governed by user access in the system. Account managers receive important notifications regarding their own contracts prior to expiration dates, price adjustments, and termination deadlines. The next phase will be to integrate Complete Control with our ERP system.“
Success criterias for getting started with a contract management software, according to åsE
- Define your needs for a tool that supports your business
- Define your scope – what to include, and what not to include
- Have a dedicated project manager with team members from IT and business operations
- Define a clear timeline with milestones (detailed project plan)
- Have regular meetings in the project team to follow up on tasks
- Have documentation in place throughout the process
- Have an implementation plan in place and invest in kick-off sessions
TAKE CONTROL OF YOUR CONTRACTS
See for yourself how our cloud-based contract management software gives you control over contracts, assets and liabilities.
