[00:00:01] Speaker A: Data cleanup and document conversion, or contract lifecycle management.
Hello. Thank you for joining us. This is what counts, a podcast created by Trailblazer Consulting. Here we highlight proven solutions developed through our experience working with companies across various industries, and we talk about how you can apply these solutions to your company. We share our experience solving information management challenges like creating and implementing a records retention schedule, creating an asset data hierarchy, or helping with email management or helping with contract lifecycle management. This is Lee, and in this episode, Maura and I will talk about data cleanup and document conversion as it applies to contract lifecycle management systems.
Maura, this is a huge, huge subject. So how do we kind of fit this into 1015 minutes podcast here? When it comes to data cleanup, that's just a disaster in itself. And then document conversion.
[00:01:00] Speaker B: Well, let's just set some expectations here in our ten to 15 minutes podcast, we are not going to solve the problems of data cleanup and document conversion for contract management.
[00:01:12] Speaker A: Amen.
[00:01:14] Speaker B: What we're going to do is introduce the concepts, the items that are frequently overlooked when you're planning for a contract management solution and suggest some approaches. That's what we're going to do today. We might do more on a different day, but today we're just going to talk about this at a high level. All right, so we're talking about contract management. We've been talking about contract management for a few episodes now. It's building up. I'm getting very excited.
So the world of contract management, people often think about the document. You have a contract in front of you, it looks like a document and you've signed it and the other party has signed it. Whether you've signed it in ink or electronically doesn't matter.
It's a document. You could hold it. You could print it out and you could hold it. It feels like just a done thing, but in fact, that's just a thin representation of what a contract really is. The contract is really about the meeting of the minds between the parties to say, here's what we're going to do and here's how we're going to do it.
That meeting of the minds, the here's what we're going to do and here's how we're going to do it. That's data.
Right now, it's just knowledge in your head, and it's represented on a piece of paper or on an image of a piece of paper in a system.
But we're talking about contract data. We want to get at that substance. So who are the two parties involved? It's Mora and Lee. What kind of an agreement is this? It's an operating agreement for the company, and that means certain things. And you have definitions of what's involved in an operating agreement, then you spell out the terms of, well, what happens in this contingency or that contingency? And what's this operating agreement going to do for us? Like, why do we even have this? And it says things like, we have this because we're going to set up a limited liability corporation. One of us is going to be responsible for turning the taxes in. I love that that was spelled out in the agreement and that I could make it you.
So that's the. That's data and, yeah, we've got that in a document and we've got that in our heads. If we had a contract management solution, we would want to spell that out into data fields. Okay. We're a small business. We only have the two of us to worry about. But what if, in terms of that agreement, we only have the two of us to worry about? What if we were an energy company and we were trying to build a utility scale renewable energy production environment, say a solar farm or a wind farm? Well, you got a whole lot of contracts related to building that wind farm. You've got land leases or deeds or right of way agreements or easements that are all about, where are you going to put this farm, this wind farm, or this solar farm?
Who are all the counterparties on those leases and agreements? What are all the terms that you have to meet? It could be notice for access. It could be some kind of a post construction cleanup that you have to do, or you have to, you know, plant some trees because you took some trees down. It could be any of those things that's all captured in your contract. It's in your document that you and the landowner signed, but it's not very accessible. If it's just in that document, then we have move on to the next step.
[00:04:55] Speaker A: Sorry, but I like the one that says, don't dig after rain near the river on a landowner's agreement.
[00:05:05] Speaker B: A landowner's agreement don't dig after rain near the river because it'll cause a mudslide, I guess.
[00:05:11] Speaker A: Right. Or more flooding. Yeah.
[00:05:13] Speaker B: I don't own a piece of land near a river. So that. But that makes sense, right? So you need to know that if you're going to be digging, you need to know that that exists in one of your agreements. How do you know that exists in one of your agreements? If all you have is a document, even if it's an electronic document. Somebody's got to read it. So, okay, that's a piece of data that you want to have in a system.
When we're talking about contract management solutions, contract management systems, it's possible that you have one and you're moving to a bigger one. It is more likely if you're at the beginning of your journey or if you're kind of a small business growing to be a medium business, you've got a lot of spreadsheets.
You got a lot of spreadsheets out there that have some data about all your contracts. So what we've seen in many of the organizations that we've worked with is somebody will have a spreadsheet that will be about all the lease agreements, and it'll have the landowners, the date they sign the agreement. It may or may not have quirky things like the digging by the river after the rain. They might note that if it's a problem for them or if it has been a problem for them and they don't want to miss it again, and it will have contact information and some other things about it, and it'll be in a spreadsheet, and there'll be 150 rows about all the landowners that are connected to a certain project that one person has. They might put it on a shared drive or a sharepoint site, and other people can see it, but one person's in charge of it. Somebody else will have a set, a spreadsheet that's all about who's working on the project to build this farm. They'll have the EPC contractor, or they'll have the architect, or they'll have the, you know, the people who are providing field maintenance at the site and that pieces of data about that contract, all those contracts will be in a different spreadsheet, and there will be no connection between those two spreadsheets.
Then you'll have some documents that are in a secret folder somewhere, and they're all about the financing and who are the partners involved in this project. And only the deal guy will know where that is and maybe the treasurer of the company because it's sensitive information and you can't let that out. So you've got financing documents over here, and you've got construction documents are at the contractor's location because you've outsourced that. But you have that spreadsheet that says who all is working on what. And you have your land lease agreements that are mapped over here in a spreadsheet with reminders for the one person who set it up reminders of when they have to pay annual rent or something. So you're trying to manage this business and now you've got all these spreadsheets and now you have a contract management solution. So when we're talking about data, it's about how do you get the data out of all those spreadsheets and into that contract management solution? So that you can do searches, you can do reporting, and you can have automated notifications or emails that say, hey, it's time to, it's the rainy season, make sure we don't dig by that river, or it's time to do the annual report to these customers.
You keep starting to say something.
[00:08:36] Speaker A: I keep not vegetation. We need to remove the branches around all of the wires and blah, blah, whatever the case may be.
[00:08:43] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, exactly. All of those things. So working through all those steps is the data conversion. Like it's your data cleanup and conversion. First, where is your data? Second, what data is important? If you have a system, are you happy with the data that you're tracking in that system? If you have a bunch of spreadsheets that people are keeping separately, which of those pieces do you want to move into the system? So there's an assessment process, like an analysis process of what have we got? But let's talk about those financing documents that are in the secret folder. You don't really have any data about them. You just have the documents themselves. So you need to know things about the financing, too, because those contracts have terms as well. First of all, who are the counterparties, who are your financers or who are your investors? Second, they may have reporting requirements. Third, they may have requirements for certain levels of cash on hand that you have to demonstrate by sending bank statements on a regular basis. You want to be able to capture those terms in your contract management system so that you can do reporting and notifications and everything off of those, too.
It's not enough to have it in the document because if you're a big company growing quickly and doing a lot of projects in the renewable space, you probably have a lot of financing agreements and you don't want to lose track of, oh, I was supposed to have a certain level of cash on hand, or, oh, I missed a report, and now the level of cash on hand has gone up because they think now I'm a problem. So all of that data analysis is a first step before you start actually converting data into the system. And converting data in this case is uploading. You build your indexes, you build your metadata screens. In your solution, every contract management system has a way to do this where you say, what kind of data do I want to capture? What are the fields that I need to know? And then you can upload it. Typically you can upload it with a spreadsheet. There's certain formatting that you're going to have to do, depending on the solution. But if you've got the data clean and in one place, you can get it into the system. Worst case scenario, you're retyping it. But let's hope not. That's the data side.
Believe it or not, the data side is easier than the document side.
Okay, so why? Why is that true?
Because you got that secret folder of financing documents. Somebody knows where those are.
Then you've got the person who is in charge of the construction and the person who's in charge of the permitting and the person who's in charge of the land leases and the person who's in charge of the procurement of the materials that are going into the construction or the person who's going to be working on connecting your wind farm to the electric grid and what's involved in that process, where they're dealing with a regulatory authority. And there's a lot of correspondence, but there's also a, ultimately an interconnection agreement. So now you got five or six people who are working across this whole project setting up contracts with different groups and creating documents, and they are storing those documents in different places. Even if you have one place that you have designated as this is the project SharePoint location, or this is the project shared file site, and this is where we're going to put everything. People are going to forget. People are going to put a version out there and then they'll make a change and they'll forget to update it. People will keep their own copies because they need them and it's easier.
We know this from our many years of experience working with people and documents of all kinds. So you're going to have to track those all down. You then need to figure out, do I have all the right versions and how do I match up those contract documents with that contract data that I collected in the first place and that I converted into the system, that I cleaned up and converted into the system. So at the end of the day, I want, here are all my contracts, and here are all my base contract agreements, here are all the amendments, here's the correspondence, all connected to that contract record.
It's a huge task, depending on how old your company is, depending on how big your company is. If you're in a growth period if you've done some acquisitions.
What I'm trying to say here again, we're just level setting on what this world of data and document conversion for contracts is.
Don't skip this step.
Don't think it's enough to stand up a new piece of software and say, okay, I'm ready to manage my contracts. Because if you haven't thought about all of this old stuff, this is going to be a huge piece of work to get this data and these documents into your new system so that you can start taking advantage of the ability to do the searches and do the notifications and do the reporting and have everything in one place.
[00:13:58] Speaker A: That was a lot.
I'm sitting here nodding my head to everything that you had to say. I'm sitting there rolling my eyes that, oh, my gosh, if you had to do that, if you're trying to match documents to data to be found in any place, versions, as soon as you hit versions, that's where you lost me. Not in terms of I was lost in the process, but in terms of, oh, my gosh, could you imagine trying to find the accurate version, the latest version of a particular item?
That could be a disaster in itself.
So, yeah, don't shortchange this stage.
[00:14:37] Speaker B: Yeah. That's the key takeaway from today's lesson is don't skimp on the data and document conversion step.
We might have to spend some more time on data and document conversion on later episodes, but it's enough for today. Cause we can, because we're past our ten to 15 minutes just to say, don't underestimate this.
[00:14:58] Speaker A: If you have any questions, please send us an email at
[email protected] or look us up on the web at www.trailblazer.us.com.
Thank you for listening, and please tune into our next episode. Also, if you like this episode, please be a champion. Share it with people on your social media network. As always, we appreciate you listeners. Special thanks goes to Jason Blake, who created our music.
