SharePoint-based Contract Management System for Oil & Gas Company

  • Custom solution covering full-cycle contract management
  • Quicker document processing powered with custom workflows
  • Collaboration spaces for different departments to communicate and work on contracts within a familiar SharePoint interface
Expertise
Collaboration Solutions
Content & Document Management
Business Process Automation
Verticals
Oil & Gas

Iflexion developed a contract management solution to help the Customer reduce time and effort spent on contract processing and approval.

Calendar
5
Months
Gears
2000
Person-hours

Context

Our Customer is a large oil and gas enterprise that explores and develops oil wells, extracts and transports oil and gas, as well as researches new ways of oil production. The company develops over 2,000 square kilometers of license areas and extracts over 8 million tons of oil yearly.

Challenge

The Customer was using a legacy system for proposal and contract processing. As the system was outdated and didn’t support critical features, the Customer was facing several difficulties:

  • While enabling document storage, the system didn’t allow employees to automate full document cycles, thus they had to switch to email to share documents with several users, request their approval or feedback.
  • The system didn’t support cross-departmental document workflows. Thus, when employees from different departments needed to collaborate on the same document, they had to create separate workflows for every department.
  • The system didn’t have collaboration features for the staff to collaborate on documents. That’s why employees were spending much time on communicating via third-party tools and face-to-face meetings.

Since the existing system was difficult to modify in accordance with the company’s needs, the Customer decided to build a new document management system (DMS) based on SharePoint and entrusted the project to Iflexion because of our broad experience in SharePoint consulting and development.

Solution

Iflexion’s team took up the challenge to create a custom contract management solution. The SharePoint team designed a new system to help employees manage contracts at every stage of the cycle, starting from application submission and ending with contract archiving.

To create a contract, an employee can use a dedicated contract form. The form contains a variety of tabs for users to fill them in with necessary contract details.

  • General: to summarize a contract’s attributes, including contract description, contractors, and budget.
  • People: to assign employees responsible for a contract.
  • Department details: to provide information about a department, including the number of employees, departmental specialization, particular security and environment regulations the department sticks to.
  • Schedule: to determine estimated contract timeframes and key milestones.
  • Documents: to note related documents.

To ensure seamless enterprise-wide document management, Iflexion’s SharePoint consultants set up a variety of workflows. Developers used out-of-the-box SharePoint workflows (approval, collect feedback and collect signature) to cover such essential needs as approving a contract, requesting a contract review or a contract signature. Additionally, Iflexion developed custom workflows using custom event receivers to enable complex multistage contract management involving multiple employees from different departments.  

The new SharePoint DMS also works as a centralized collaboration space for employees to communicate and work on documents within the same interface. Owing to SharePoint co-authoring features, employees now can manage the same document simultaneously and avoid document duplication.

Development Process

The SharePoint DMS development process consisted of several stages, including:

  1. Business analysis and system architecture.
  2. System implementation and configuration of SharePoint out-of-the-box.
  3. Development of document workflows in line with the Customer’s contract management needs.
  4. Configuration of collaboration spaces.
  5. System testing and bug fixing.

Once the system became generally available, Iflexion carried out series of training sessions for the Customer’s:

  • IT department to explain key principles of the solution management and support.
  • End users to present the system’s functionality and capabilities.

Results

Iflexion delivered a custom SharePoint-based contract management solution built in line with the Customer’s requirements. The new system allowed the company to:

  • Centralize and standardize contract management processes across the enterprise.
  • Enable automated document workflows that cover full document cycles, both on departmental and cross-departmental levels.
  • Ensure employees’ collaboration on documents within the same system.
  • Minimize manual work and reduce employees’ efforts spent on contact approvals, thus shortening overall document cycles and making the contract management process more efficient.

Customer Voice

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