Accor scales global contract management across 600+ users

The challenge

Accor Group, a worldwide and world-renowned hospitality conglomerate, was using a Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) solution in its daily operations to work through their contracts. However, as it continued to expand and diversify its product portfolio, managing and updating critical details, establishing rules by brand or location, and overall enterprise-wide contracting duties proved increasingly impossible. The Accor team was forced to perform a manual refresh for each contract, leading to time-eating data inconsistencies and costly operational inefficiencies. Moreover, users could not properly access data from other systems and sources, restricting their ability to manage contracts effectively.

“We came up with a list of 100 things, and we could’ve gone on but 100 was enough.”

– Richard Dudley, Legal Digitization Manager, when asked about the gaps in their previous CLM

Accor evaluated multiple solutions on their replacement search, and as the team narrowed it down, they put providers through one last test. They performed demos of the final candidates with users and legal departments worldwide, allowing what would be their daily CLM users to have a vote in the decision – and they had a winner with Agiloft far and away receiving the strongest votes from daily operators and legal departments globally.

The solution

The Accor team transitioned to Agiloft’s CLM solution, which was able to provide the functionality and flexibility they were seeking. For the first time, Accor’s global teams could access the contract data that was important to them, regardless of where they were in the world. Agiloft’s system allows users to access data from multiple tables and views, offering a more holistic view and enhancing the ability to manage contracts efficiently.

Accor’s decision, while already supported by user testing, can also be attributed to the superior performance by Agiloft’s professional services team. Their team committed to completing the data migration within a couple of months, ensuring Accor could perform a seamless transition from their previous CLM, with an impending termination date, immediately improving their contracting workflows through Agiloft without an interruption in service.

The impact

With the partnership of Agiloft’s professional services team, the implementation of Accor’s new CLM was completed ahead of schedule on an already tight timeline. With extra care and guidance throughout, the team went above and beyond to encourage usage, promote user satisfaction, and overall optimal system configuration; this led to broader user adoption and a significant increase in the number of active users. For the first time, Accor was able to grant access to daily contract managers outside the legal department, with total CLM usership growing from 200 to over 600, providing greater transparency, accessibility, and actionability across the global organization while freeing up legal’s time.

Agiloft’s professional services team was able to create a completely bespoke portal, enabling worldwide Accor users to access their regional contract templates and important record data efficiently, supporting their efforts to secure new hotel partnerships and expand Accor’s brand presence globally. For the second phase, Accor was positioned to introduce and implement a Global Contracting Policy for the first time, with rules and templates to introduce standardization across the entire organization. With unprecedented global reach, standardization, and data transparency, the impact on Accor’s legal team was immediate Richard explained, “You don’t need to send emails anymore to legal, users are given access to the contracts they need access to, there’s hours of time saved already with just that part of the solution.”

“The professional services team were amazing, they were really clued into how the application worked, and how we could get the best out of the solution… even if there was a benefit in doing it in a slightly different way or a different button.”

– Richard Dudley, Legal Digitization Manager

The adoption of Agiloft’s CLM system had a transformative impact on Accor’s contract management processes. Overall, Accor’s new automated processes eliminated the need for manual data refreshes, significantly reducing the administrative burden, unlocking unprecedented time for legal teams, and enhancing data accuracy within their CLM and the integrated systems throughout their organization and brands.

Challenges

Separate and disjointed systems and processes hindered progress and shared knowledge across the organization

With price and structure limitations, hundreds of pertinent users were unable to access their contracts or perform contract-related duties directly with the system of record

Without a global contract policy, or an actionable repository, leadership could not gain a singular view into individual or group hotel operations

A lack of flexibility and partnership with their outdated system provider prevented any future improvements across their organization

Benefits

Accor was able to implement a Global Contracting Policy, where regional contract managers and legal teams as well as global operators gained unprecedented process efficiency

Accor’s CLM user base grew from 200 to over 600 users thanks to Agiloft’s flexible licensing structure. Teams were able to access and process contracts through CLM for the first time

With streamlined operations and a Global Contracting Policy firmly in place, Accor leadership gained unfettered access to their contracting processes and were able to focus on iterations and improvements, not searching for information

Accor found a true partner and enterprise solution with Agiloft, with plans to leverage AI (Artificial Intelligence), full-authoring, and more in the future

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