Keller Williams is the world’s largest realty company, with more than 200,000 agents stationed in over 1,000 offices around the United States alone. Though Keller Williams is focused on disrupting the traditional approach to real estate, they were, up until recently, hindered by the lack of a central content management system that could provide visibility into their vast portfolio of contracts.

The challenge

When Travis Somerville started as head of procurement at Keller Williams, he encountered some operational bottlenecks stemming from legacy contract management practices. For example, he learned that employees kept track of renewals manually, on spreadsheets. When team members took time off of work, those spreadsheets didn’t always get updated.

As a result, Keller Williams was missing renewal deadlines and getting stuck with auto-renewing contracts that they no longer wanted. Without a way to track renewal deadlines and thereby give themselves a chance to review and make strategic decisions regarding vendor relationships and agreements , the Keller Williams team was potentially leaving hundreds of thousands of dollars on the table.

Additionally, while contracts were stored on secure network drives, they weren’t all housed in one place, making it difficult to collect accurate data. “It was really hard,” Somerville said during a recent Evisort webinar, “to give an executive an answer of ‘what’s our total spend in a certain category?’”

‍

The solution

The Keller Williams team needed a way to put their contracts into a searchable repository and mine those contracts for vital business data.

They looked into several contract management systems. However, when they saw a live presentation of Evisort’s cloud-based, AI-powered Contract Intelligence Platform, it changed the team’s entire way of thinking. Not only had Evisort scanned Keller Williams’ contracts with market-beating 97% accuracy — it had also turned the documents into usable, minable data.

The takeaway

For the first time, Somerville and the Keller Williams team saw what it would be like to have access to an AI-powered contract management system that automatically pulled current data from all of their contracts into a central dashboard, with information on data points such as “top counterparties,” “top governing law,” and “breach notice.” They also saw the benefit of having information at their fingertips about upcoming renewals, giving them time to review those contracts and make informed decisions about whether to continue with those vendors.

With Evisort, Keller Williams could:

‍Input 1,000 contracts an hour into Evisort, without IT support. This combination of speed and autonomy made it possible for the team to rapidly scale their contract management operations.

Cut back on outsourcing. Evisort’s proprietary AI automatically tracked key information, dates, and provisions from contracts without manual data entry or review. Somerville observed that the tags that came “out of the box,” alone, potentially replaced more than $1 million in legal consulting fees.

Enforce consistent contracting processes. Evisort’s customizable workflows enable teams to create and enforce standardized approval chains. At every stage, Keller Williams employees now know which part of a contract needs review and approval, and from whom.

‍

The results

Within one month of uploading thousands of contracts into the Evisort system, Keller Williams realized a full return on their investment in the best-in-class contract AI. The team immediately found two contracts for data services that they weren’t going to use — but those agreements had slipped under the radar. Without Evisort, Keller Williams would have been locked in for a year to two contracts they didn’t need.

Evisort further increased and accelerated that return on investment by:

‍Accurately identifying and tagging force majeure provisions. Force majeure provisions free both parties from their obligations if certain extraordinary events occur — such as, for instance, a pandemic. Evisort’s AI correctly identifies clauses based on the context of the language, even if, in this case, the words “force majeure” are nowhere in the document. As a result, Evisort helped the Keller Williams team quickly come up with a list of 150 contracts that contained force majeure clauses.‍

Freeing employees’ time. Having Evisort in the Keller Williams toolbox was like having an extra employee. Evisort’s AI did the heavy lifting of locating and tracking key clauses and information, enabling the Keller Williams procurement team to concentrate on more strategic tasks.

Increasing efficiency. Evisort’s streamlined, end-to-end Contract Lifecycle Management enabled Keller Williams to optimize contracting workflows, collaborate across teams and counterparties, and manage self-serve workflows from request, review, negotiation, approval, and execution through payment and delivery, amendment, and expiration.

Helping leadership see the big picture. With thousands upon thousands of contracts, it can be hard to see the forest through the trees. Evisort allowed the procurement team to answer stakeholders’ questions quickly and confidently. With Evisort, Somerville says, “I feel very powerful…because time and time again, I have executives coming to us with important problems to solve in a short time. And when you've got a system like this, it gets you through it very quickly.”

‍

Want to see how Evisort’s AI can help your procurement team maximize the ROI of contract management software? Schedule a demo today!