Integrating Contract Lifecycle Management into SalesForce

With one of its customers, Synerzip developed a product for contract lifecycle management. This software solution not only helps a company define and maintain contracts; it also generates alerts and reminders for key elements of contracts. The end result reduces business risk and cost significantly while improving efficiency.
Watch this short video with the demo on this CLM integration into Salesforce®.
 

 

The solution manages the complete lifecycle of a contract, starting from defining and creating, then moving into negotiation, necessary approvals and finalization, virtual filing and management. It also provides alerts and reminders for events such as renewals, statutory requirements and so on.
However, most enterprises use a Customer Relationship Management (or CRM) tool for managing business opportunities. The sales team uses CRM for maintaining leads, contacts, notes and any other additional information about a potential customer. When a lead converts to an order, this information is handed over to an operations team, which initiates a contract and manages it using the Contract Lifecycle Management CLM) product which is made by our customer.
Using CRM and CLM leads to the existence of two complex ecosystems running in parallel; and this leads to duplication of efforts. The integration is not seamless, adding data from one system to another is painful, prone to errors and difficult to maintain.
Our client’s business team found that more than 30% of their customers use Salesforce for their CRM needs. In order to be competitive in business, Synerzip was tasked with integrating the customer’s CLM system with Salesforce. Such integration would allow a Salesforce user to initiate a contract in CLM from an opportunity. The request would include the necessary contact information, opportunity details and any additional information needed. The CLM then takes over: it automatically fills in the information received into a contract template. CLM users can then finalize, review and approve a contract.
Integrating two hugely complex systems was a significant challenge. While Salesforce allows such integration by means of “callouts”, because of its extendible nature, most of the screens are generated in dynamic manner and their contents depend on context of information being rendered. On the other hand, the CLM system also has the capability of having user-defined workflows; and its expectations and validations can change depending of type of document being initialized.
In order to make this happen, the team implemented a REST webservice, which allows them to fetch data from the CLM for population and validation of data, generate Visualforce markup using wrapper for Salesforce metadata API, and create a Visualforce page using generated contents. Now, the CLM pre-populates all relevant fields, and the user can move forward with contract workflow.
 
End users of the CLM system found this integration valuable. They get a seamless experience across company tools. The Synerzip development team acquired the skills to integrate complex enterprise solutions to Salesforce. This resulted in improved productivity for the company. Our client gained the competitive edge in the market, which helps improve their business.