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Overview

About Reed.co.uk

Reed.co.uk was founded in 1995 as the first recruitment website offered by a recruitment agency in the UK. Since then, Reed.co.uk has gone on to become one of the largest recruitment and careers marketplaces in Europe. As well as featuring hundreds of thousands of vacancies on their website and mobile app, Reed.co.uk also offers thousands of learning opportunities, as well as expert advice on CVs, interviews, and professional development.

CaseStudy-Graphic-Results
Introduction

Case Study

With hundreds of contracts stored in Google Drive and managed by individual stakeholders, it was increasingly difficult for Ben Hodson, Head of Operations and Purchasing, to keep track of every supplier agreement.

Manually tracking contracts risked missing key dates, such as renewals, and when a supplier agreement auto-renewed before the business could renegotiate terms, Ben knew it was time to take control of Reed.co.uk’s contracts with a dedicated contract management platform.

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Challenges

With oversight of a large volume of business-critical supplier agreements, the team at Reed.co.uk is responsible for managing a complex contract portfolio, with varying levels and types of legal and commercial risk. 

However, despite efforts to consolidate documents and record key components of each agreement in Google Drive, there continued to be a risk that important contract milestones would be missed and opportunities to renegotiate terms not seized. 

What’s more, with contract ownership historically falling to individual business owners, tracking down every live contract or relevant document made the challenge of day-to-day contract management even greater.

With no true system of record, and the business continuing to grow rapidly, a dedicated contract management system was identified as a key requirement. It would help the team at Reed.co.uk avoid unwanted renewals and costly obligations, while increasing its potential to identify and negotiate better outcomes with suppliers.

They knew a contract management solution would:

  • Help to keep contracts organized via a single source of truth
  • Provide proactive notifications of important upcoming dates, such as renewals
  • Give senior stakeholders easy access to key contract data, such as spend, terms, and notice periods, while eliminating time spent on ad hoc ‘find-it, fetch-it’ reporting tasks
  • Enable contract owners to maintain access to important contract data

No true system of record

Missed auto-renewals

One-off reporting requests

Lacked insight into key data

Results

By implementing ContractWorks, Ben and the team at Reed.co.uk have been able to transform the way they manage business-critical vendor agreements.

After a four-week implementation period, Reed.co.uk was soon able to benefit from a well-organized central repository for all contracts and legal documents, with user-based roles and permissions to control access. 

Document tagging has enabled the team to capture critical information, such as contract values, notice periods, and renewal dates, while notifications keep individual contract owners informed of upcoming milestones and opportunities to cancel, renew, or renegotiate agreements.

In-depth reporting has eliminated the time spent responding to management’s ad hoc data requests. Saved reports are scheduled to be sent as Excel documents to senior leaders, giving management visibility of contract exposure, spend levels, and supplier commitments.

The enhanced transparency of Reed.co.uk’s contract portfolio has given Ben and his team a significant advantage when it comes to contract renewals, saving the organization hundreds of thousands of pounds. In the first 12 months of using ContractWorks, 87% of Reed.co.uk’s live contracts were renewed at the same or a lesser cost than the previous 12 months, highlighting the value of having ongoing access to key contract information and being well informed of upcoming negotiation windows ahead of renewal time.

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Implemented in 4 weeks

Saved over £100,000

Automated reporting for C-Suite

No surprise auto-renewals