Ooredoo has chosen Icertis Contract Intelligence (ICI) as part of its enterprise-wide digital transformation. The company wants to streamline its contract management across its offices worldwide so it can support the long-term growth of the business.
Christian Friedrich Linhart, Group Chief Procurement Officer, Ooredoo Group, said “A key pillar of Ooredoo’s corporate strategy is to evolve today’s core business and build a smart telco, thereby further digitizing our operations and accelerating growth. To achieve this, we are partnering with world-leading providers to help us consolidate business applications on a common platform across our operating companies around the world.
“We are very happy to have selected Icertis for its telecommunications industry expertise, AI capabilities, and extensive SAP partnership and integrations, which offer us a single-team approach to enterprise-wide contract intelligence.”
Ooredoo is putting contracts at the heart of its transformation
As part of its enterprise-wide transformation, Ooredoo is implementing a wave of cloud-based software. Mission critical systems such as ERP, HCM, SCM and telecommunications expense management are part of that move. This deal sees it add Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) to that set of apps.
Enterprise Times asked Icertis what benefits Ooredoo expected from CLM. It said that Ooredoo “plans to achieve end-to-end, centralized contract management and intelligence with seamless integration with SAP S/4HANA, Ariba, HCM, and Concur. They have also procured the ICI NegotiateAI application to advance and speed negotiation of supplier contracts.”
Adding CLM makes a lot of sense for Ooredoo. It currently manages thousands of contracts across the enterprise with suppliers and customers. CLM will make it much easier for the company to understand what is in its contracts. It will be able to see where supplier contracts diverge from standard terms. This will allow it to identify risks to its supply chain and potentially excessive costs.
It will also be able to look more closely at customer contracts. Again, non-standard items can be easily identified. There is also an opportunity to identify where contracts have not been followed. For example, some contracts make special pricing terms that have not been enacted. There may also be cases where contractual price increases have not happened. It means that CLM will help improve margins.
The company is also adopting the AI-based ICI NegotiateAI application. This will allow it to do automated reviews of contracts to identify any of the items above. It will also allow it to more easily review third-party contracts. Rather than have individuals read through contracts, NegotiateAI brings a standardised approach to contract review. It removes the risk of human error.
A global rollout over time
Sensibly, this is not a big bang approach by Ooredoo. Although no timeline was given for the deployment, Icertis did say that Ooredoo will roll out the Icertis applications in phases by operating region. The first of those regions will be the Group HQ which is based in Doha, Qatar. After that, it plans to deploy across its 7 operating companies.
It will be interesting to see how quickly NegotiateAI helps standardise contracts across all those regions. Similarly, what issues it uncovers as it looks to help Ooredoo move to a standardised contract regime.
Will all of this lead to a fully smart contract solution? It is an area that Icertis has been working towards. Given the number of contracts Ooredoo has across multiple regions, smart contracts are attractive. They help to enforce standardisation and contract terms. The latter is especially important when the contracts have rising costs or prices associated with them. It also helps ensure that no money is lost when contract breaks occur.
Enterprise Times: What does this mean?
This is a good win for Icertis. It brings it another major company and one that is growing quickly. Just as important is that Ooredoo has chosen Icertis to work alongside new investor SAP. It demonstrates that SAP is working with Icertis where opportunities for CLM arise.
If more of these deals follow it can only be good news for Icertis. The bigger question is whether SAP will look to increase its investment in the CLM leader. The deal also shows that Ooredoo is looking for a flexible cloud platform of solutions that do not lock it into a single vendor. Thirdly that the strength of SAP is not just in its own solutions but the platform and third-party products such as Icertis and BlackLine that it can bring to the table.
