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- Brandon Meek
Senior Director of Project and Process Management,
Idea Integration
Idea Integration took the time to understand our as-is environment to ensure that we were building the correct solution for the future. Most partners come at us directly with technology without truly understanding our business needs. Additionally, the Business Consulting contacts remained consistent throughout the engagement and allowed us to have full transparency into status and next steps.
- Chris M.
VP of IT,
Private Oil & Gas Services Firm
Home > Case Studies > Contract Automation
The contracting process for Kinder Morgan, one of the largest energy transportation, storage and distribution companies in North America, was a completely manual process that lacked consistency in how the Contract Administrators handled the process in storing, naming, and recording their contracts. The combination of multiple contract administrators and a lack of a consistent process led to many different ways for the same task to be completed and often resulted in lost productivity when a contract changed administrators. The lack of an electronic mechanism to store and version important documents related to the contract introduced a high degree of risk into the process.
Due to the manual process and employing twelve Contract Administrators, there are a dozen different approaches to completing the expected Contact Management tasks. Bringing consistency to the process would allow for a stronger support system for backing up each Contract Administrator, would reduce the time spent in managing contracts, provide for electronic storage of completed documents, and ensure version control on all templates.
The Kinder Morgan Contract Administration department uses a manual process for issuing and tracking contracts and related documents, including logs, document storage and retrieval, and notifications. Internal customers have also requested a one stop shop for knowing what contractors are current and can be used for work or bidding. There is also a need to house and maintain version control of all contract templates and related documents for the bidding, contracting and purchasing functions. The automation of these functions will allow the Contract Administration group to focus more on the content and applicability of contracts versus issuing paper to accomplish a task.
Kinder Morgan partnered with Idea Integration to implement a Phase I Proof of Concept Pilot system that would leverage the power and functionality of SharePoint Portal Server 2003 and Microsoft InfoPath to provide a means to automate, store and control all contracts and related documents. At the completion of the successful pilot, Idea Integration implemented a full solution that included integration with Lawson Financials and other external entities over XML Web Services. Microsoft Word was automated to pre-fetch, pre-populate and aggregate the necessary templates used for the contract, as determined by user selections in InfoPath forms. As a whole, several key technologies were combined to provide a single, unified system for Contract Administrators, Auditors, Risk Management and Corporate Management.
The impact of the solution was far reaching; drastically reducing the time and errors that normally accompanied the preparation of new contracts. By providing a single point of electronic storage and versioning of contracts, automating the process of contract creation and pre-populating contract forms with external system data, Kinder Morgan is realizing significant savings in man hours and are seeing lower error rates among Contract Administrators.
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