ATAMIS
Pushing the Boundaries of Buy-Side Contract Management

Contracts are quintessential to procurement. Hence, efficient contract management needs to have a holistic approach that addresses multiple aspects related to procurement like vendors, sourcing work, pipeline planning, spend analysis, and so on, to effectively drive the entire commercial strategy. Though there exist several solutions for handling the functions like spend analysis, pipeline management, e-tendering, contract management, and others, these are generally disjointed or work on separate platforms.

This is where, Atamis, a UK-based company, comes into play, offering an end-to-end procurement solution that unifies multiple modules of the entire commercial strategy cycle on the same platform. This includes spend analysis, pipeline management, contract management, tender management, and SRM. Contrary to the traditional approach that restricts the contract managers from engaging completely with the wider scope of the business, Atamis presents an all-in-one platform that allows contract managers to have a comprehensive overview of the entire commercial lifecycle. This enables them to engage with the system right from the pre-sourcing work plans, business case approval, planning the commercial activity, procurement practices, maintaining transparency and consistency, contract management, document negotiation, to the monitoring of supplier’s risk, contract renewals, and pipeline planning. The result: contract managers can achieve greater visibility through all the processes and improve the productivity and efficiency of the contracts.

“We offer a comprehensive, end-to-end solution, centralising all contract management and related activities, from pre-sourcing to efficiently executing contracts, for greater productivity,” states Nick James, managing director of Atamis.

The integrated contract management system of Atamis offers a web-based, user-friendly, cloud-hosted, completely backed-up and resilient centralised contract register that improves the efficiency of managing the contracts. This enables multiple users to access a single system simultaneously instead of trying to connect and co-ordinate with several systems. Moreover, the system helps eliminate the manual processes of spreadsheets and emails and reduces the chances of manual errors.

“Our system helps remove the inefficiencies of having multiple versions and emailing information or documents around and people not knowing which version they are using and thereby committing overriding errors,” adds Nick. Furthermore, the system is easy-to-integrate with other modules that further enhance contract managers’ visibility of the entire process.

Adding more to its prolific catalogue of contract management solutions, the Atamis system helps in document management and authoring, as well as offering an integration with DocuSign for seamless e-signature functionality. In addition, with several productivity tools, Atamis assists in tracking the contracts, risk profiling, contract segmenting, timeframe tracking with information like review dates and notice dates, auto-scheduling periodic tasks, linking emails to contract registers, among others. Further, clients can record and measure savings gained from contracts and also track the social value benefits, which are essential, especially for public sector contracts today. As the organisation’s contracts and that of the suppliers and spend data share the same platform, the managers can monitor supplier KPIs and SLAs on the key contracts.

Currently there is a trend within the UK public sector that’s seeing large government departments with multiple organisations, authorities and arm’s length bodies moving towards operating on a single platform. Atamis, with its expertise in streamlining the contract management processes, has been able to deliver this for the UK’s largest public sector employer, the NHS, via its contract with the Department of Health and Social Care. “Multiple organisations like NHS England, NHS Digital, Care Quality Commission, and others, can collaborate while having strict data segregation, with no visibility of another organisation’s confidential contract data,” adds Nick.

Substantiating the automation capabilities of Atamis’ solutions, James mentions the success story of a renowned private sector client, a FTSE-100 insurance group. The primary requirement of the client was to conduct due diligence on the contracted suppliers. Now this required asking several questions to the suppliers. Before Atamis came into the picture, the organisation conducted surveys manually, which was onerous and cost-draining. Atamis automated this process, allowing the system to automatically send the questions to the suppliers, and store the questions and answers of the previous years that the suppliers can view and respond to, through the portal. After submitting the suppliers’ responses, the system evaluates those reports and determines whether the suppliers are compliant or have been non-compliant in any cases. And if a supplier is fully compliant, the system automatically marks them as approved suppliers. This significantly eliminates any manual intervention on the due diligence processes and has saved the time of the suppliers as well as the client.

What’s more? Atamis’ solution features extensive flexibility and can be adapted and configured to varied industryspecific requirements, external regulatory requirements, or internal corporate policy-related or other client requirements. For example, with UK leaving EU, certain contracts were severely impacted. It was a requirement to implement these major changes on an immediate and priority basis, without delays. Atamis’ competitive solutions can offer this lead time. Another distinguishing feature of Atamis is its excellent reporting capabilities. “Our reporting tool integrated into the application allows clients to report on any data element within the system and for end-users to create their own reports and dashboards,” adds Nick. Importantly, the responsive support provided enhances client satisfaction with the solution.

“We are optimistic about the future; we’re keen to expand Atamis to other sectors and to develop our products in line with client needs. There’s also an obvious opportunity to widen our reach geographically, beyond the UK and Eire, which would unlock lots of potential,” concludes Nick.