Seal Software has strengthened its relationship with SAP. It now has a listing on the SAP App Center and has added a Contract Analytics AI application extension for SAP® Ariba. The addition of Seal Software to the Ariba marketplace enables Ariba customers to leverage its AI powered contract intelligence features in conjunction with SAP Ariba Contracts. It also enhances the use of SAP Ariba Contract Lifecycle Management. Companies are now able to search through contracts using the AI solution to surface insights and to highlight issues.
Dan Daehler, Vice President, Alliances at Seal Software commented: “Better visibility into contracts improves procurement outcomes and uncovers the opportunities and risks that correspond to the procurement and sourcing professional’s most common and often most complex challenges. Seal puts richly detailed analytic policies – designed and built by procurement experts – into the hands of SAP Ariba users to meet their evolving need for contract information around topics ranging from regulatory compliance, intellectual property, renewals, and termination, to audit rights and data privacy.”
Benefits of an AI powered CLM
The Seal solution delivers several benefits in conjunction with SAP Ariba.
- Enables visibility of the entire corporate content of contracts from across multiple repositories. Documents can be de-duped and rapidly search for. This enables contracts that need updating, due to legislative changes, to be found quickly.
- Seal Software can also help to extract SAP Ariba metadata previously hidden deep in specific contracts. Seal estimates that extraction and validation of data is 80 times faster using its solution.
- It is also able to extract and index contract terms, further enhancing the procurement teams understanding of their contractual requirements. This is also useful during M&A activity and audits.
- With better oversight and availability of information, it tightens use of SAP Ariba and encourages adoption and improves compliance.
It delivers these benefits through the delivery of five core features:
- Contract discovery and migration. Seal looks across multiple storage areas including SharePoint, Box, Ariba, and other SAP applications. It will deduplicate contracts and provide a single point of search.
- AI Driven Contract analytics. It learns and indexes contract clauses for later much simpler analysis.
- Ariba contract workspace cleanse. Adding Seal into the process simplifies onboading of new contracts as data is automatically extracted, validated and updated to Ariba.
- Ariba contract upgrades. Seal assists companies migrating between SAP solutions simplifying the ETL process during an upgrade, potentially improving the validity of the data.
- Validation and migration of Ariba Contracts.
Pricing for the Seal Solution is available on request. Seal provides pricing for a Recurring edition and also offers customizable pricing.
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
Seal Software contracts analytics solution accelerates time to value for SAP Ariba. For companies that have built digital repositories of contracts both within and outside their SAP Ariba solutions, this new app provides a solution that they may historically have felt was too huge a task. It enables companies to get a grip in a very short space of time of their entire contract portfolio, rather than migrate to new contract terms over time. Looking forward it simplifies the contract management processes and enables analysis that historically has been virtually impossible. At least within a reasonable timescale and cost.
For companies looking to go through M&A activity it is especially useful. Seals ability to ingest, analyse and update SAP Ariba can simplify the onboarding process. Importantly, for Seal this is another major vendor that it is partnering with to accelerate its growth. It already has close ties and investment from Docusign. As it adds more partnerships, its ability to grow without being acquired increases. What is missing from this announcement is an endorsement from SAP and an indication that they will help to push Seal Software to its customers. If Seal had established a similar relationship as that of BlackLine it would have made a major difference.
