Resilience Customer Story

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Resilience: Saving legal time for substantive legal work with Zip

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Background Information

Spokesperson: Kevin McKenna, Assistant General Counsel

Industry: Biotechnology

Company size: 1,600+

Headquarters: La Jolla, Ca

‍Tech Stack: Slack, Okta, Ironclad, Coupa, ProcessUnity, Smartsheets

Result from Zip: Mitigated risk, saved 40% of time spent negotiating contracts

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Problem: Complex and clunky approval routing, with high demand for quick-contract turnaround in a highly regulated space 

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Technology-focused biomanufacturing company Resilience is changing the way complex medicines are made, revolutionizing medicine manufacturing to get drugs to more patients, more affordably.

The legal team at Resilience is responsible for risk-management, which translates to handling a plethora of contracts with a variety of vendors to help the business grow with all of their necessary spending. 

“If you're spending time trying to figure out who needs to sign off on this and who needs to sign off on that, and what regulatory terms you need in each contract, and you don't have a good way of gathering that information from the various stakeholders, you're going to spend a lot of time messaging folks, balls are going to be dropped and you're not going to be spending your time doing actual legal work, which provides the most value to your company.” - Kevin McKenna, Assistant General Counsel at Resilience. 

Prior to Zip the time allotment spent on all these contracts was high. This included collaboration with the security team, finance, various regulatory stakeholders and the requestor from the team who needed to get the contract negotiated and signed quickly. 

“The last thing that the business owner wants to hear is that it's stuck in Legal.” 

Resilience needed to make sure that the right process was in place for contracts to move forward quickly yet also ensure a thorough job can be done to minimize business risk.

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Solution: A user friendly way for everyone to engage with the legal team

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Zip provides an easy to use intake form that asks just the right questions and policy-based approval workflow, leading to higher employee adoption of the procurement process. With this adoption of the process, Zip enabled Resilience to build a system that centralizes necessary information from all stakeholders, scales alongside them and keeps their information organized. Zip provides a front door that sits in front of Ironclad and other business systems to make it easy for legal to collect the right information from users and include the right people from the broader organization on the approval chain. At the same time, the actual legal work of managing the contract details and redlining contracts can happen within Ironclad, the best-of-breed software of choice for legal teams.  

“Zip allows you to get better contracts done faster.”

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Organized approvals internally

Zip keeps everything organized, from the necessary information needed to who needs to sign off on what, so the legal team can spend their time focused on legal issues, rather than organizational alignment and logistics. At Resilience there is an average of five departments that need to approve anything before it is purchased, and each group has its own set of evaluations to get there.

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Automating Manual Tasks

Zip automates manual tasks in the process, to save time. 

“A lot of the work done in negotiating a contract with a vendor from a legal perspective is somewhat formulaic, and so it's a matter of gathering the appropriate facts from the appropriate people, and then translating that into the appropriate provisions with the counterparty. What Zip does is it really automates and systematizes that information gathering process, so you're spending your time doing the substantive legal work, which is more interesting and more valuable for the company.”

With all the appropriate information gathered up-front, the Resilience legal team has what they need to get the legal work done within Ironclad.

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Relevant information aggregated for better contracts

The system is set up in a way that allows for conditional logic to get all the information needed from every stakeholder effectively. 

“With Zip you use conditional logic to ask additional questions, so legal and quality, data security, and other regulatory groups can gather the information that they need to evaluate the vendor and memorialize those terms within the contract”

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Result: Mitigated risk, saved 40% of time spent per contract

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Time Savings

By automating manual tasks and keeping the process organized and streamlined, the legal team saves time and can focus on core legal tasks. 

Prior to Zip, the legal team at Resilience spent anywhere from 2-25 hours per contract. The majority of that time was spent on gathering information and chasing approvals. The time savings from Zip have led to actionable results. 

“On a typical vendor contract, legal might spend anywhere from two to 25 hours negotiating that contract. Prior to Zip, half of that time could be spent just chasing information, instead of doing substantive legal work. Now, with Zip, you're spending 90% of your time doing actual legal work on the vendor contracts.”

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Risk Reduction

With every purchase there is an inherent risk. For a business like Resilience, purchases need to be made quickly to keep up with the speed of business. 

“Zip helps us make sure that everyone whose approval is necessary before someone in the company can buy something is obtained. That helps you buy things faster with reduced risk, ensuring your regulatory compliance, but what it also does is it provides a record of what risks were brought to what folks in the business and who signed off on those risks. That can be valuable down the road if things go wrong and you need a record of who did what and when.”

The Zip platform has allowed the Resilience team to manage risk while building trust in the process. 

“Zip gives me a much higher level of trust that I'm getting all of the information that I need from the business to negotiate the contract, because without an easy system of gathering all of the requirements and documenting who has approved what, you lose a lot of faith in your process.”

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A Better Experience for All

The experience with Zip not only has led to a significant increase in productivity and efficiency, it has led to a better experience for all parties involved, including stronger relationships between the legal team and the rest of the organization. 

Zip sets up teams for success when working together with legal. They are guided by a process that is clear and transparent, which sets up a healthy working relationship. 

“Zip makes the process seamless and it makes it impossible to fail for the requester. They know where they go when they want to buy something, and that's all they need to know. From there, all they have to do is just answer a simple set of questions that appear in front of them. And so that gives me a lot more trust that I'm getting the information that I need to negotiate a contract, and a lot more trust that I'm providing a good experience for my internal business users so they don't dread going to the legal team when they want to buy something.”

As a result, there is a more efficient and united organization that works together more collaboratively. The rest of the teams are happy to collaborate with the legal team, and the legal team can get their work done faster, more thoroughly, and with happy stakeholders. 

“Zip allows me to provide that much better of an experience to my internal customers, so I'm getting a lot more happy feedback from my internal business users. I'm getting a lot more 'thank-yous' and a lot less, 'Where's my contract?'”