Utah keeps contracts under control
Connecting state and local government leaders
The state's Office of Economic Development is streamlining its contracts management process through Conga Contracts, a Salesforce application.
In Utah, the Governor’s Office of Economic Development is tasked with negotiating contracts for 16 grants and incentive programs ranging from outdoor recreation infrastructure to technology startups. Despite the wide range of GOED programs, the agency doesn’t have the staff or resources of large organizations to handle its large contracts.
While GOED officials use the Salesforce customer relationship management tool to manage the awards, they found that without a dedicated contract management tool, some contracts stalled in the negotiation process or got lost in the shuffle of routine business, which created more work for contract officials who had to redo contracts and start the process over again.
Working with Conga, an application provider for Salesforce users, GOED can now manage the entire contract process through Salesforce, integrating information from a variety of sources and enabling electronic signatures through DocuSign.
Conga Contracts provides a cloud-based add-on to Salesforce that keeps track of the negotiation process rather than relying on tracking changes in Microsoft Word.
“Under the old system, one party could forget to turn on the track changes which necessitates a line-by-line comparison for due diligence by our legal team,” GOED’s Salesforce Administrator Jaron Janson told GCN. “It was a time-consuming process and hard to keep track,” he said.
Now, workflows changes can be automatically reported in real time to all agency officials involved. GOED estimates Conga Contracts will improve contract generation by 30 to 40 percent, with further improvements expected to the negotiation and conclusion phases.
“It increases the efficiency and also provides better analytics for the agency in terms of determining where the contracts are in development and being able to track how the negotiation process unfolds,” Janson said. “We are able to do the complete delivery process through Salesforce for all of the different programs that we have.”