Team size: 12

Looking forward, what technological advancements do you feel will impact the role of in-house legal teams in the future the most? Which have you found most useful in your legal team? 

This question is best evidenced with a relevant and hugely successful piece of Britvic Legal-led technological advancement, project Optimus, which involved the technological advancement and transformation of contracting at Britvic, which has been a source of immense pride for the team. The project has three key elements of transformation: contract creation, enabling faster and more flexible contracts; contract approval, through electronically generated approvals; and contract management, which avoids leaks through an active management of all our contracts.

The project started with a hypothesis from the general counsel that most businesses, without a clear contract management strategy, would lose money through contract leakage. The legal team commissioned KPMG to prepare a report on contract leakage, to quantify the contract management opportunity that we had identified. This report revealed a significant opportunity to be realised by having a more evolved form of contract management, consisting of both behaviour change–identifying who the contract manager is for a particular contract–and technology change, the latter meaning producing a system that not only stores contracts, but also helps their management, identifying key issues around pricing, and giving the contract manager early warning of key dates.

The legal team worked to create a plan to implement project Optimus, driven significantly by the business case initiated via the legal team’s instruction to KPMG. This has resulted in the introduction of SAP Ariba as a total source-to-pay technology solution for procurement for Britvic. The automated contract approval and contract management modules are now live, and a similar process will follow for the sales function shortly.

An interesting insight was gained when Britvic Legal spoke to other legal teams who had tried to implement similar technology with mixed results. From this it was clear that where legal were brought into a change late in the process, the result was poor. The difference with this project for Britvic Legal is that they initiated significant parts of the business case themselves, and since then played a key leadership role in the shaping of the project.

Project Optimus has transformed the way in which contracts are created, approved, and managed. We have moved from a manual and time-consuming process to a fully digitised process which allows faster execution while also improving controls. The KPMG report on contract leakage identified significant savings because of improved contract management. These savings will be generated over the next few years, and we are confident that the solution we have built allows us to achieve the benefits we identified at the beginning of the project.