A Legal Front Door for Better Cohesion
Kloeckner Metals partnered with Summize to create a legal front door, reducing the length of the entire contract lifecycle to benefit the whole business.
Key Outcomes
Objective
Kloeckner Metals UK is the UK business of Klöckner & Co, a German listed €848m EBITDA international producer-independent distributor of steel and metal products with a network that spans across 13 countries, 140 locations and employs over 7,200 people worldwide.
A key pillar of Kloeckner’s strategy is further successful rollout of digital platforms to increase automation and reduce carbon emissions. Digitalising contract lifecycle management at Kloeckner is a huge step forward in both improving efficiency and targeting legal resource.
The primary challenge for Kloeckner was to speed up the contract lifecycle and streamline appropriate legal processes. The legal team received repetitive and similar urgent requests for certain contracts from the wider business. It was therefore clear that this was an area that could benefit from automation which would free up the legal team to focus on more impactful work.
Additionally, as Kloeckner is a fast-paced business with an aggressive growth strategy, the legal team wanted to keep up with its growing demands and set a good foundation for future growth. So, Kloeckner set out to digitally transform the legal process, enable ongoing analysis of risk and as a result, better support the wider business and Kloeckner's growing customer portfolio.
The Solution
To digitalise the contract lifecycle and streamline legal processes, Summize created a legal front door using its Microsoft Teams integration, a well-established platform in Kloeckner's current operations. By using the Summize Microsoft Teams Add-In, now any user can create or review a contract without having to send a request to legal.
On top of this, by using Kloeckner's bespoke templates created in Summize, any business user can automatically create contracts by answering a series of questions. The questions are set up and designed by legal, who can approve the contract before it is sent to a customer.
Kristel Graham, UK Chief Compliance Officer, General Counsel and Company Secretary : "When searching for a contract automation partner, it was critical that our chosen provider would be flexible enough to fit with familiar applications for ease of adoption for our colleagues whilst also allowing us to develop and future proof it to meet the changing needs of the business. Summize’s ability to integrate into MS Teams and Word has empowered business users to self-serve and their flexibility and openness to suggestions from both the Legal and Digitalisation team has meant that Summize now fits neatly into our user experience. Summize has enabled us to shift our focus away from repetitive but important high volume tasks eg NDAs to be real strategic partners to our colleagues and it also allows us to gain valuable insights into the risk profile of the business at the touch of a button."
Outcome
Empowering business users to create simple but bespoke contracts (e.g., NDAs) has meant Kloeckner’s legal team can shorten the contract lifecycle and speed up internal processes.
Integrating directly into current tools has made using digital contracting software seamless, and the whole business can already see the benefits.
For Kloeckner’s customers and employees, this is yet another step forward in the company's digital transformation journey to deliver innovative solutions and create efficient supply chains.
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