Automation Helps DHL Reduce Manual Contract Management Work by 60%
DP DHL is a global leader in logistics and postal services, connecting people and businesses with innovative solutions across six key divisions in over 220 countries.
Overview
Deutsche Post DHL Group (DP DH) is one of the world’s leading express mail and logistics services providers. The company is headquartered in Bonn, Germany, and employs over 500,000 people. DP DHL is known for its commitment to sustainability and innovation, seamlessly connecting people and businesses, and shaping the future of global trade.
“We want to set up the standards together with the business units and then outsource the legal work to the business. Tell them, ok, these are the clauses you can use. This is the template. So, please compile your contracts following your decision tree logic.” – Frank Stoessel VP, Head of Legal Operations
Challenge
DP DHL’s operations span six diverse business divisions. Between these departments, there are millions of suppliers and customers operating under diverse and often complex contracts. At the time, DHL’s legal team of roughly 300 lawyers across 50 countries managed every contract.
Manually managing the complexity and volume of their contracts with, comparatively, a “small” legal team led to:
- Inefficient processes
- Increased customer-supplier disputes
- Lack of visibility outside of the legal team
- Strain on legal team resources
- Difficulty tracking contract obligations
- Poor productivity
- Extended contract cycles
DHL needed a CLM solution in place that could help
- Relieve other internal functions – procurement, sales, finances, IT – dependence on legal to facilitate contracts.
- Give Legal time back to focus on more strategic work.
- Centralize their contract into one place.
- Improve cross-team collaboration and efficiencies
Solution
Sirion’s CLM technology lifted the manual workload from the legal team and enabled procurement and sales teams to generate self-service contracts. The system efficiently routed only the contracts to the legal team or in-house counsel that required their input and approval.
Sirion did this by helping DHL:
- Migrate approximately 30,000 contracts over to a centralized contract repository using an auto-extraction.
- Implement a comprehensive clause and template library that any internal function could access to help draft or negotiate a contract.
- Establish automated approval workflows to streamline operations and ensure internal compliance.
“We had a lot of your functional requirements. We wanted to upload our clause libraries. We wanted to embed our metadata, our business-specific data points. They had to be easy to transfer into a CLM tool. Usability was key. So, we had quite a long list. In the end, we were pretty happy with what we saw in this area [on the Sirion platform].”
Impact
The transition from manual to AI-enabled contracting processes resulted in significant efficiencies for DHL and its legal team:
- Reduced time to contract – Standardized processes and a comprehensive clause library reduced Legal’s review and approval time by 70%.
- Improved cross-functional synergy – Automation and self-service features reduced interactions, minimizing unnecessary tasks.
- Decreased risk of errors – Standardized templates and automation mitigated deviations and errors.
- Faster access to data – An 80% reduction in contract data extraction time helped DHL monitor obligations with more visibility, negotiate better, and maximize contract value.
- Better relationships – DHL reduced customer-supplier disputed by 80%.
- Less dependence on Legal – Automating processes and standardizing clauses and templates into one place helped DHL reduce Legal’s manual workload by 60%.
“Ultimately, we ended where we are with Sirionlabs (Now Sirion) and this was like the first time where we found a full match in all categories.”
Additional Resources
Ensuring Contract Management Security: 4 Key Software Ingredients
Five AI Capabilities for CLM You Need to Know
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