ContractWorks and Louis Dreyfus Company
Louis Dreyfus Company is a leading global merchant firm with over $36 billion in revenue. The company operates in multiple sectors, including agriculture, food processing, international shipping, and finance.
Overview
About Louis Dreyfus Company
Founded over a century ago in 1871 and headquartered in Europe, Louis Dreyfus Company (LDC) now operates in more than 100 countries and employs approximately 17,000 people globally. Like many other enterprise companies, LDC faced challenges in improving their business operations and encountered issues in collaboration between departments on legal matters. By adopting ContractWorks, LDC successfully streamlined their legal and business processes.
Introduction
Case Study
Prior to implementing ContractWorks CLM, it took LDC employees approximately 45 minutes to process a single contract. For a large company with numerous requests processed by in-house legal, this was both time-consuming and costly. Therefore, their decision to automate contracting operations was driven by the need to improve efficiency and reduce expenses.
General Counsel
Louis Dreyfus Company
“What I like most about ContractWorks is their top-notch customer service. The people I spoke with were very friendly and helpful in highlighting how ContractWorks could solve our issues. Then once we chose ContractWorks, they took over all the automation and setup. After that, they organized several training sessions for our different teams, and they gave us manuals on how to use the platform. I give ContractWorks an 11/10 on service!”
Challenges
When we began our collaboration with LDC, they already had an ERP system in place to manage internal business processes. Contracts were frequently sent out for signature with typos and errors, and Sales and Legal teams lacked collaboration tools, resulting in back-and-forth emails as a means to redline and approve each document. Manual contract drafting further prolonged the contract delivery cycle and hindered contract turnaround time.
Following several meetings with the newly appointed General Counsel at LDC, we outlined the implementation plan.
We started with a low-risk project – by automating the NDAs. The rollout of ContractWorks took four days. Within six months of collaboration, LDC has initiated the expansion process, to further integrate our CLM into other business units, and cover a larger contract portfolio.
No collaboration tools
Delays in contract delivery
Documents had typos and mistakes
Required integration with ERP system
Results
After a year of partnership, LDC held an architecture board meeting where the decision was made to further integrate ContractWorks with the existing ERP system. This expansion included the automation of complex delivery contracts and a range of corporate documents.
This allowed LDC to simplify their contracting and amplify their ROI. Data transfer from the ERP to ContractWorks now enables Sales to draft contracts seamlessly within the ERP system without needing to access the ContractWorks dashboard. Legal has complete control over the templates, while Sales only have access to the latest template versions, resulting in error-free compliant contracts without any direct input from Legal. The time spent per document has reduced by a factor of 10, decreasing from 45 minutes to just 3 minutes. LDC achieves annual cost savings of up to $409,500 on legal expenses.
Integration with ERP
Mistake-free contracts
Save up to $409,500 annually
3 min per document
LDC's Team:
“Their collaborative editor is so quick and convenient that we don’t even use MS Word unless it’s with our external clients.”
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