How to close 8,000 or more rental agreements in a year.

Facility Contract Management

General Overview

• Reduction of the processing and acceptance of rental contracts from 2 months to a few weeks

• Parallel processing of contracts instead of manual, sequential processing of contracts based on e-mail

• Reduction of the error rate of more than 30% of contracts to be coordinated to a few processes per hundred documents

Challenge

The company has to collect a few thousand locations to offer digital broadband services and manage them. Based on the specific process flows the workflows must be optimised and changed during the complete lifetime of the facility contracts. In the beginning everything was managed in Microsoft Excel Sheets and via email. The complete process to manage a facility contract took a few weeks from the first interactions with the owner of a property until the contract is closed. Based on the short timeline a contract should be exchanged, validated and underwritten in 1-2 weeks instead of 1-2 month. With the manual review and completion of a contract, it takes a few weeks to complete due to sequential processing with e-mail and Excel.

The management expects 30-50 contracts per week to be managed by a small, multi-person team. With the targets set, a few dozen employees would have to be hired and trained within a very short period of time in order to meet the targets. Due to the lack of skilled workers and the strict time specifications, the approach with additional staff is ruled out and the only way to drastically shorten the processing time is to use digital process automation.

Action

Based on the bloofactory process, a digital process based on Microsoft 365 could be coordinated within a week. Using specialised process consultants and UX designers, a web-based solution based on Microsoft 365 Services was designed and developed within several weeks. The company was able to try out parts of the solution during the development process and continuously introduce changes.

Contract initiations and contract documents and contract annexes to be agreed are sent directly to a digital inbox by the process partners involved. Employees can edit the documents and topics to be agreed directly from a digital contract process. Corresponding checks, corrections and edits are carried out directly online using the well-known tools Word, Excel and Powerpoint and can be followed and edited live online by all those involved. A process and contract document can be processed by several people at the same time within one day, and can be coordinated and finalised directly in Microsoft Teams meetings. An integrated task management enables a complete tracking of the activities and secures the cooperation of several teams - lawyers, facility managers, technical teams, etc. - with deadlines and automated reminders. The integrated archiving permanently stores the agreed contracts and fulfils all necessary and legally prescribed compliance and documentation regulations.

Result

The coordination of leases could be reduced from 2 months to 1-2 weeks. At the same time, the parallel processing of contracts with the same team was increased by a factor of 10, thereby achieving the goals set by management.

Perspective

With the implemented contract management, the processing has already been significantly reduced. The company is already working on a continuous development of the solution for necessary services such as rental agreement adjustments, utility bills, necessary service management for maintenance work and other topics. Based on the bloola factory process with the standard Microsoft 365 platform, new functions can be implemented and rolled out within a few days and weeks.