The U.S. healthcare system is notorious for chronic inefficiency due to its sheer size and complexity. With thousands of locations to serve on tight deadlines, medical distributors know the true cost of an inefficient system. One of the nation’s largest healthcare distributors, H.D. Smith, works with hundreds of vendors to deliver drugs and other medical products to pharmacies, long-term care facilities, hospitals, and clinics. Managing its vendor contracts —over 1,000 of them— was a challenge, to say the least. Although they had an online system that stored and accessed the contracts, it didn’t provide any significant contract management functionality beyond that. Worse, the system had become obsolete to the point that their own IT department was no longer supporting it.

Knowing that moving to a new system and process would be a huge undertaking, the company set out to find the best system for their needs from a supplier that would manage the implementation for them. They evaluated eight contract management systems against a wish list of a dozen requirements before choosing Agiloft.

Satisfying the demands of the company’s multiple departments and business units required extensive customization, which was not a problem for Greg Myers, Project Success Manager for Agiloft in charge of the implementation. According to Chrissie Melton, H. D. Smith’s Contract Administrator, “We had quite a lot of customization for Greg to do, and we changed a lot of things. But he was very easy to work with and always found a way to include everything we asked for.” Greg also designed the implementation so that Agiloft was compatible with the company’s existing SAP system.

The Agiloft system has been in use for over a year now. Chrissie is particularly impressed with its contract review and approval workflow. “The system keeps the contracts moving and gives people a sense of personal responsibility for completing their reviews,” she said. In addition, she likes its reporting features and the custom homepages and default views for each user. “It gains buy-in from people when you can set the system up in such a way they can use it easily and get the information they need quickly,” Chrissie added.

Read the full H.D. Smith story here.