How AFL Built a Contracting Foundation for Scalable Growth

Founded in 1984, AFL is a global manufacturer with products in over 130 countries, providing end-to-end solutions to the energy, broadband, data center, AI and industrial markets. The company operates manufacturing facilities worldwide and provides a comprehensive portfolio of services and solutions supporting network infrastructure, data centers, service providers, wirelessand power grid modernization.

The challenge

For years, AFL managed contracting activity across email, shared drives, CRM records, SharePoint repositories, business-unit folders, and individual storage locations. As the company grew globally through manufacturing, product sales, services, acquisitions, and new business models, contracting practices became more independent and less consistent across teams.

AFL had explored CLM before, but the earlier business case was weighted heavily toward legal fee savings and efficiency and was not approved.

"Growth exposed the need for enterprise visibility, governance, and a trusted source of contract data.”
– Claire Lawrence, Legal Operations Manager & Privacy Lead, AFL

Over time, challenges reached a tipping point that made it clear the organization needed to search for a CLM again. Signed agreements and key terms were not always easy to locate, while inconsistent templates, repositories, and storage practices made contract information difficult to manage across teams. Some agreements reached Legal only after commercial expectations had already been set, and unclear escalation triggers made it difficult to know when Legal, Finance, or other stakeholders should be involved. Approval and signing authority expectations were not consistently understood, adding further uncertainty to the process. Without a trusted source for contract data, reporting was limited, and teams lacked reliable visibility into renewals and obligations. Together, these issues highlighted the need for a more consistent, connected approach to managing contracts and the data within them.

Once leadership could see the business risk created by fragmented contracting, the CLM initiative received support. The case  for change had matured from administrative improvement to operational control, data visibility, and risk-informed business enablement. That shift was important. It reframed CLM as part of a wider contracting maturity journey, not simply a software purchase.

The solution

During the RFP process, business stakeholders evaluated how contracting actually worked and defined a desired future state. The process helped AFL compare its current operating environment with the capabilities needed to support continued growth.

As AFL evaluated its future-state contracting model, it needed more than a place to store agreements. The organization needed a CLM platform capable of bringing greater consistency and governance to contracting while still accommodating the different workflows required by its mix of products, services, regions, acquired businesses, and contract types.

Agiloft was well suited to those requirements. Its no-code architecture allows organizations to configure workflows, approval chains, data models, and automations around their business rules rather than forcing every agreement through the same process. For AFL, that flexibility could support its goal of establishing consistent governance while routing agreements according to contract type, risk, complexity, and required approvals.

"The challenge was how to create consistent governance while allowing different contract types to follow workflows appropriate to their risk, complexity, and business purpose.”
– Claire Lawrence, Legal Operations Manager & Privacy Lead, AFL

Just as important was Agiloft’s data-first foundation. AFL needed to move contracts out of disparate systems and storage locations and establish a reliable system of record, with trusted data that could eventually support reporting, renewals, obligations, and contract intelligence. Agiloft centralizes contract information and turns clauses, obligations, expiration dates, and other agreement information into structured, searchable data that can be reported on across the business.

Because AFL often works from third-party paper, negotiation playbooks and clause guidance was important for future-state capabilities. They were not the highest initial priority in the search, but the capability to incorporate playbooks into the contracting process was important. Agiloft provides these capabilities today, giving AFL a clear path to incorporate negotiation playbooks and clause guidance as its contracting program matures.

The impact

With Agiloft, AFL built a contracting foundation designed to scale with the business. By bringing agreements from disparate repositories and storage locations into a centralized CLM, AFL has created a more reliable source of contract information and greater visibility into agreements, commitments, obligations, renewals, deadlines, and risk.

That visibility supports stronger governance. Using Agiloft’s configurable workflows, routing, and approval rules, AFL has established clearer processes for when Legal, Finance, and other stakeholders should be involved, how agreements are approved, and which contracts require greater scrutiny. Because Agiloft’s no-code platform can adapt workflows based on contract type, risk, complexity, business rules, and approval authority, AFL can apply consistent governance without forcing every agreement through the same process.

"Contracting maturity starts with visibility, governance, and trusted data.”
– Claire Lawrence, Legal Operations Manager & Privacy Lead, AFL

AFL also does not have to choose between enterprise consistency and the flexibility required by a complex global business. Agiloft can support different products, services, regions, acquired businesses, and agreement types while maintaining common governance principles.

The result is a shift from fragmented contracting toward a more mature enterprise operating model built around visibility, governance, and trusted contract data. As AFL grows, it has a flexible foundation for evolving its contracting processes and putting contract data to greater use across the business.

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