Typically, dealing with contracts throughout the M&A lifecycle means a lot of manual and tedious work that takes attorneys and contract specialists more time than anyone wants to be spending.
And what’s happening outside the legal department during this extended timeframe? Customers are confused, the sales team misses renewals, Finance may have little-to-no insight into the new business entity’s vendor contracts, and other contract commitments and risks are easily lost in the shuffle. These circumstances can ultimately lead to financial losses and damage to the company’s reputation. To minimize these risks, it’s crucial for companies to have a structured and well-supported integration plan in place – well before they endeavor into the world of M&A.
Pramata offers a radically simple alternative to the way companies have historically done M&A. Instead of being overwhelmed by numerous new and old contracts, companies can use the Pramata platform to combine an unlimited number of contracts from various mergers and acquisitions into one central contract repository that actually serves as a single source of truth. Really.
Whether your company is facing its very first merger or acquisition, or you’ve got a dozen under your belt from the last two decades, Pramata can solve the pain points associated with the state of your contracts before, during and after M&A.
Common M&A contract challenges
Mergers and acquisitions come with a lot of contract work: From providing buyers with the information they need during due diligence to identifying overlapping customers and vendors to finding gaps and areas of risk in the new company’s collective contracts, it’s nearly impossible to complete the M&A without spending a lot of time deep in contract questions.
Some of the common contract challenges businesses face during M&A include:
- Wasted time and resources as people search for customer information in disorganized systems
- Limited or unreliable information in Salesforce (or another CRM) that hinders sales teams
- Lack of reporting capabilities across each company’s library of legacy and current contracts
- It’s difficult to impossible for Legal to achieve efficient and precise due diligence
- Incompatible billing systems between acquired companies
- Contract components are dispersed across personal hard drives, scanned PDFs, and spreadsheets
Together, these challenges (and many more) can lead to hindered growth and greater risk across multiple business functions like operations, compliance and account management.
Case in point: A company with 400,000 disorganized contracts
As an example of how contracts create challenges for companies undergoing M&A, take this story from a Pramata customer:
A leading US telecommunications company was aiming to revolutionize its approach to serving enterprise clients. It wanted to evolve from a conventional telecom company to a comprehensive solutions provider, which meant acquiring strategic assets to expand and diversify its offerings.
However, hindering the progress were discrepancies, deficiencies and errors in customer data, scattered across outdated systems and acquired entities. This created problems for various teams, including Legal, Finance and Sales.
With a customer base of over 400,000 contracts and a constantly growing database of more than 8 million records, this company needed a solution that would provide a complete and accurate picture of every contract across every business relationship.
With Pramata, the company was able to accelerate its integration of three acquisitions. They uncovered $3 million in recurring revenue (ARR), improved retention of at-risk revenue by 4.5 percent and increased active selling time for the sales team by 15 percent. Read the full case study here.
The Solution: Radically simple contract management with Pramata
It may sound too good to be true, but it’s not. Pramata has spent more than 17 years perfecting our technology and process, which to date has digitized and organized millions of contracts, while extracting contract data at 99%+ accuracy to give you a contract repository you can trust. Without any heavy lifting on your part.
While our technology and proven processes yield results for any organization that deals with contracts, it’s particularly game changing for those going through M&A. Here’s how it works:
Pramata Cleanse
Pramata Cleanse is the crucial first step that centralizes and cleanses all of your contract files to determine what should be included in your digital repository. This ensures all your contracts (even those from M&A) are de-duplicated, identified as non-contracts and contracts, and basic metadata extracted … so no junk ends up in your repository.
“The difference between Pramata and other contract management solutions is we don’t have to clean up or organize any documents. They do all the heavy lifting. The result is a game changer not only for the legal team, but for teams across the business.”
Andrea O’Rourke, General Counsel, ICE Data
Pramata Organize
Pramata Organize takes your cleansed contracts and gives you a comprehensive digital contract repository as your single source of truth. We take care of the heavy lifting to make all your contracts are organized into Document Families, so you’ll have contract relationship summaries, accurate renewal dates, contract status and key terms right at your fingertips. Organize makes it effortless to run reports, search across every contract and perform in-depth contract analysis. Pramata even simplifies navigation across your contract portfolio after M&A with clear labels for affiliations like “Acquired By”, “Affiliated with”, “Formerly Known As” and more. This enables quick cross-referencing between contracts of related entities with which you may have separate agreements.
“If you’re the GC for an in-house legal department, the ability to have a single source of truth and to know your contracts are searchable is essential. If you don’t know what’s in your contracts, you’re shooting blind. You don’t know where your liabilities are and there’s massive legal exposure for a legal department that doesn’t know what’s in its contracts.”
Thien Dinh, SVP & GC, MetricStream
Pramata Accelerate
Pramata Accelerate is our pre-signature solution that provides a radically simple way to go from Contract Requests to Deal Collaboration, with full transparency across Contracting KPIs and Metrics. This is particularly helpful for companies engaged in M&A that are trying to streamline multiple contracting processes from previous companies into one intuitive way to do business. All of this (and more) with a Salesforce Plugin that empowers the business to self-service directly in CRM.
“Using Pramata’s drag-and-drop request forms and templates, we were able to greatly improve our affirmative renewal process. We went from an average of two months to get a renewal contract signed, to a reality of four days, even as the process is still in its early stages of adoption.”
Karen McElrath, Deal Support Manager, symplr
Pramata Connect
Connect is Pramata’s solution to the common business problem of too many different people and teams working off their own version of a contract, in their own system, or no system at all. If you’re dealing with M&A, the problem can be exponentially worse as you try to combine not just different teams and their way of doing things, but entirely different contracts and products or services into one. Pramata Connect ensures everyone has access to the precise contract information they need, when they need it, in the systems they use most.
“The self sufficiency that our teams have gained is huge. They don’t have to come ask me questions about auto-renewals, conditions, or start dates like they used to every day.”
Kurt Frederick, Head of Renewals, MetricStream
Pramata GenAI Experiences
Pramata’s Generative AI Experiences utilize our proprietary Contract AI output of clean, structured and organized contracts and data. These GenAI Experiences drastically reduce time-consuming tasks across your contract process, which helps your team focus on high-value tasks instead of digging through contracts to find trends or answer questions, analyze data against playbooks or drafting standard contracts .
Simplify and speed up M&A with Pramata
We’ve worked with our customers for nearly two decades to make sure contracts are helping, not hindering, their M&A activity. From generating instant reports across specific (or all!) contracts to aid in due diligence, to post-merger integration of all entities’ contracts into one digital repository, Pramata is the only contract management solution that turns “business as usual” into “business better than ever.”
To learn more about how Pramata can make M&A radically simple for your organization, contact us today.
