FlexGen’s challenge.
Two-person contracting team tasked with managing and analyzing agreements with clients and partners operating critical energy infrastructure.
FlexGen’s achievements.
Centralized contract storage, accelerated drafting workflow, and consistently empowered engineers and executives with timely insights.
The role of Workday.
Established contract repository, reduced review time, and surfaced accurate analytics.
Every clause carries extra weight when the clients and partners who depend on you are also the ones the world depends on for its energy. Following consecutive years of > 40% growth at FlexGen, its executives started to worry about the sustainability of the company’s contract management practices. Historically, contracts had been hosted by the relevant business teams using their preferred storage tools.
However, the expanding scale of FlexGen’s operations turned that serviceable solution into a major frustration. Gathering the context needed to draft a new master services agreement, for example, might require weeks-long email threads followed by days-long knowledge transfer sessions. Contract specialists could then spend several more weeks manually extracting and embedding clauses in highly technical agreements spanning hundreds of pages.
Yet despite the organization’s best efforts, key details occasionally slipped through the cracks. “Even if we had budget for more headcount, the impact of any new hire would still be limited by our reliance on tribal knowledge,” explained FlexGen Contract Manager Anthony Tacker. “I knew AI had to become the heart of our strategy if we wanted to manage risk consistently and cost-effectively.”
The right solution had to have a:
Trusted reputation.
The power grid is no place for experimental tools.
Intuitive interface.
Staff didn’t have time to learn sophisticated coding techniques.
Demonstrable impact.
The business case hinged upon at least 30% time savings.
Searching for a trusted AI solution.
Tacker’s personal enrollment in data science courses and experimentation with no-code tools had resulted in high hopes for what AI could help FlexGen achieve. But Tacker also had to be very pragmatic about introducing new technologies into such a complex and sensitive operating environment.
Evisort AI, now a Workday company, emerged as an early contender after Tacker recognized several high-profile customers from heavily regulated industries. And a series of product demos revealed an impressive blend of accuracy and usability. But it may have been a more human factor that proved to be the tipping point. “From the very beginning, I felt that Evisort would be a vested partner in FlexGen’s success,” said Tacker. “The team consistently went the extra mile to accommodate us and eventually earned the trust to merit a multiyear agreement.”
Without Evisort, it would’ve taken 2 full-time employees 3 weeks to do what we did in 2.5 days—analyzing 140 contracts and advising the COO.
Contract Manager
Generating immediate impact.
It didn’t take long for Workday Contract Intelligence, powered by Evisort AI, to repay that trust. One of the first use cases FlexGen tested was to create contract “cheat sheets” for project managers. And the highly technical content was no obstacle.
“We knew the software was going to be good, but this was night and day,” Tacker said. “An exercise that used to take us five days now takes two or one—and that timeliness is a game-changer for my colleagues in the field.” The impact of the team’s newfound efficiency soon reached the C-suite as well. When rumored changes to government tariffs threatened to disrupt FlexGen’s supply chain, company executives turned to Tacker to help evaluate the risks.
Leading the transition.
This early traction attracted attention from all corners of the company. Colleagues from various departments started flagging contract automation as a crucial capability in their future plans. Executives, impressed with Tacker’s work with AI, appointed Tacker, a founding member of FlexGen’s internal AI council. This cross-functional working group has spearheaded the company’s responsible embrace of AI, with members comparing notes and reporting learnings from a range of innovation projects.
The work we’ve done with Evisort has already helped me become a more confident and capable user of what I view as a pivotal technology.
Contract Manager