On-demand webinar: How Atria Plc switched to a new contract management solution [Finnish]

Atria Plc chose Zefort’s contract management solution after an extensive benchmarking and trial period between several service providers. Atria was looking specifically for a post-sign solution that is easy to take into use and provides flexibility for access management. The webinar recording is available for watching at the bottom of this post. The webinar was held in Finnish.

In our recent webinar, Zefort’s own Niklas Hakalax talked to Elina Kangas, Legal Counsel at Atria Plc. Established in 1903, Atria is today one of the leading meat and food companies in Northern Europe. Atria is listed on Nasdaq Helsinki and has around 3,700 employees in Finland, Sweden, Denmark and Estonia.

Discovering the optimal contract management solution

The project started when Atria wanted to upgrade its existing contract management system. Atria was specifically looking for a post-sign solution, where the company can store completed and signed contracts digitally and securely.

Atria’s goal was to find a solution that provides a single destination for all contracts to get a complete, real-time view to all contracts within Atria. As the entire Atria group consists of several companies, a key priority for the legal team was to ensure flexible access management among 270+ people working with contracts.

Atria’s team conducted a thorough benchmarking of solutions available in the market, trying out the various services and their features in practice.

“From the get-go, Zefort came through as a company that puts active work into developing its service while listening to its customers. – Merja Harju, General Counsel, Atria plc

In addition to meeting the key requirements, there were several factors that eventually tipped the scales to Zefort’s favor:

• With Zefort, it’s easy to customize contract cards for mandatory/optional information and required metadata.
• Being able to get reminders of important contract events, such as deadlines on renewals, contract options or guarantee periods, was welcomed by Atria’s users.
• Powerful google-like search that allows full free text searches, metadata filtering and saved searches, for instance.

Migrating to Zefort’s solution

As Atria wanted to avoid a situation where the company would have the legacy system running at the same time with the new solution, the team decided to migrate all existing contracts to the new system. The migration project included carefully planning and testing to ensure that all content is transferred and metadata carries over to the new system. Zefort’s team helped Atria during the migration process.

In addition to the technical migration, it’s really important to ensure that the new solution is widely adopted throughout the organization. To ensure this, Atria used its internal resources to organize training on the new system.

As the trainers had first-hand experience of the previous system, they were able to highlight the key benefits of the new solution compared to the old system. As Zefort is quite easy and straightforward to use, the training sessions focused on Atria’s own working practices and processes.

“With trainings, focus on the essentials instead of going through all the details. Encourage users to get started and try things out and tell them where to find help if needed” – Elina Kangas, Legal Counsel

Managing complexity with confidence

Today, Atria uses Zefort to manage all its contracts excluding HR contracts. Atria’s team considers that Zefort is a tool for both contract management essentials but also a tool to support the company’s business. Business benefits from up-to-date contract data that is readily available and easily discoverable.

One of the key criteria for Atria was access management: how to ensure that just the right people have access to specific contracts, both in terms of contract type and the company within the larger Atria group.

Atria’s team ended up defining nearly 30 different contract categories, such as sales contracts, purchase, marketing, energy and so on. The team then used Zefort’s binder functionality to create “buckets” for each contract type and each company within the group, resulting in a fairly large number of individual binders.

However, after this work was done, it became easy and reliable to add, remove and update individual users with just the right access rights. Zefort’s license model was also a good way to cater for users who do not need continuous access to the system.

Watch the webinar below: