Austin, Texas-based Keller Williams Realty, the world’s largest real estate technology franchise by agent count, has more than 1,070 offices and 187,000 associates. Before starting their digital transformation journey, Keller Williams didn’t have 100% visibility across all of their vendor and supplier contracts. Over 10 years’ worth of contracts from multiple departments, along with procurement and contract standards, were housed across a variety of legacy resources. In addition, expiring contract negotiations or re-negotiating auto-renewals were not viewable on a single, authoritative calendar.

“We still kept track of renewals on spreadsheets. Some contract information was in secure network drives, but the information was not all in one place,” said Keller Williams’ Procurement Lead. “If a person was absent or no longer in that role and that spreadsheet wasn’t kept up, we might miss renewals and renew contracts that we didn’t mean to.”

Keller Williams needed visibility into all their contract information, a searchable repository to help them mine contracts for vital business data, and a reliable alert system for contracts that were coming up for review.

Initially, Keller Williams thought they would rely on a traditional contract management service to resolve their issues. But they also reached out to Evisort to see what an AI-powered system could offer.

30-day implementation. Unlike many other systems which can take six or more months for integration, Evisort’s end-to-end Contract Lifecycle Management system was easy for Keller Williams to implement and start using immediately – no coding and no migration. In fact, the procurement team had the system up and running within a month.

Unique clauses. Beyond its initial ROI from contract renewals, Evisort’s contract management system proved it provides vital long-term value and capabilities.

Keller Williams initiated a campaign to look for contracts that could be negated or renegotiated based on force majeure clauses and the COVID-19 pandemic. Through Evisort’s easy-to-train/easy-to-use AI, they were able to train the system to recognize these unique clauses within two days. It came back with a list of 150 vendor contracts, resulting in significant cash flow savings.

Mergers & acquisitions (M&A). Keller Williams put the contract management system to another test: Could its AI help them with M&A projects – ones that they would normally outsource due to time and staff constraints?

They gave such a project to an outsourced firm to look at an acquisition, and the firm responded that there were 35 important contracts that needed review. Their internal legal team used Evisort’s AI tool to double check the results from the outsourced firm and found there were 50 contracts – not 35 – that required review.

ROI realized almost immediately. Within one month of uploading thousands of contracts into the Evisort system, Keller Williams found two contracts for data services that they weren’t going to use, but those agreements had slipped under the radar. Without Evisort, they would have been locked in for a year to two contracts they didn’t need.

Force majeure clauses accurately identified and tagged. Evisort’s AI correctly identified clauses based on the context of the language, even if the specific term “force majeure” was nowhere in the document.

Employees’ time optimized. While contract management needs human input and final review, Evisort’s AI did the heavy lifting of locating and tracking key clauses and information, enabling the Keller Williams procurement team to concentrate on more strategic tasks.

Efficiency increased. Within one month of uploading thousands of contracts into the Evisort system, Keller Williams found two contracts for data services that they weren’t going to use, but those agreements had slipped under the radar. Without Evisort, they would have been locked in for a year to two contracts they didn’t need.

Information is more visible and accessible. With thousands of contracts in Keller Williams’ files, getting the right information could be a difficult and time-consuming task. Evisort allowed the procurement team to answer stakeholders’ questions quickly and confidently.