Automation of a Conglomerate’s Contract Renewal ProcessOur solution delivers cost savings while eliminating a large amount of paperwork and burdensome manual updating.

IntroductionThis case study is about our experience automat-ing a cumbersome contract renewal process for a technology conglomerate. This resulted in sig-nificant cost savings and reduction in errors for our client.

Business SituationOur client is fundamentally a science-based company that produces thousands of imagina-tive products, and is a leader in several markets ranging from healthcare and highway safety to office products and abrasives and adhesives. It is a diversified technology company with revenues of over $27 billion.

Our client serves customers through various busi-ness segments. These units increase speed and efficiency by sharing technological, manufactur-ing, marketing and other resources. Our client has a dominant presence in business segments such as healthcare, consumer, office and safety, secu-rity and protection.

Our client uses a contract management system (CMS) to store and manage contracts with dis-tributors and end users of its products. The CMS stores information about the consumer, the sales representatives involved and the distributor, along with a list of the products and their prices.

ChallengeContracts need to be renewed once the contract duration is over. The manual process of contract renewal was tedious.

Every time a contract needed to be renewed, the sales representative had to fill a Bids Request Form. Once the user received this form, they would manually create a new version and then calculate the price for all the items again.

Our client wanted to automate the process of renewing the contract. It wanted to implement a process which would:

• Create a new version for the contracts specified by the user.

• Embed all the details of the old version into the new version.

• Have the facility to mass upload some of the contract attributes with new details.

SolutionThe task of automating the renewal process required careful planning, execution and audit-ing. Using PowerBuilder 11.0 and SQL Server, we designed and implemented a step-by-step process.

cognizant case study | october 2012

• Cognizant Case Study

About CognizantCognizant (NASDAQ: CTSH) is a leading provider of information technology, consulting, and business process out-sourcing services, dedicated to helping the world’s leading companies build stronger businesses. Headquartered in Teaneck, New Jersey (U.S.), Cognizant combines a passion for client satisfaction, technology innovation, deep industry and business process expertise, and a global, collaborative workforce that embodies the future of work. With over 50 delivery centers worldwide and approximately 145,200 employees as of June 30, 2012, Cognizant is a member of the NASDAQ-100, the S&P 500, the Forbes Global 2000, and the Fortune 500 and is ranked among the top performing and fastest growing companies in the world. Visit us online at www.cognizant.com or follow us on Twitter: Cognizant.

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Phase One:

• Prompt and populate data from spreadsheet: In this step, the system prompts the user to load a spreadsheet that contains a list of bids that need to be renewed. Once the spread-sheet is uploaded, new version numbers of all the contracts are created and the contract attributes (expiry date, list price, etc.) are populated from the spreadsheet.

• Overriding feature: Some contracts need to be overwritten. An override indicator is used for such contracts. A new item is not created for contracts that have the override indicator checked at the item level.

• Logging errors: The system proceeds through all warning messages as if the user had clicked the ”OK” button, and logs the warnings in a log file.

• Extension pending: In order to facilitate approvals, the status of the new contract ver-sions is designated as “E” (extension pending).

• Verification: Once this step is completed, the user is able to view and verify the new version of the contracts in the CMS.

Phase Two:

• Pricing: Product prices are not loaded by the spreadsheet and are instead calculated in this step. Prices are calculated for all contracts with the ”E” status.

• Logging errors and verification: The process proceeds through all the warning messages as if the user had clicked the “OK” button. These warnings are logged in the log file. Once this step is completed, users are able to validate the prices calculated.

Phase Three:

• Mass modification process: The contracts that get modified in the previous phase need some changes at each attribute level in accordance with the client’s requirements. For example, if the item status was “extended,” it is changed to “pending for approval.” The contract date is modified to the current date.

• Pop-up messages: These indicate that the status of an item should not be updated in case manual deviated pricing is to be applied for the item.

Phase Four:

• Change effective and expiration dates and mass modify the status of bids: This is imple-mented as specified by the client.

Benefits

• Eliminated paperwork: Previously, the sales representatives had to submit a Bids Request Form for each bid that needed to be renewed. After the new process was implemented, they only needed to submit a list of bids that did not need to be renewed.

• Automation of manual work: Previously, whenever bids had to be renewed users had to go to the CMS and manually renew them by creating new versions. They had to calculate the percent of increase for every product listed in the contract. The new process eliminates the need for manual calculation.

• Cost savings: With this implementation, one of our client’s business units saved $140,000 per annum by doing away with manual work in renewing/creating the new contract versions.