CPA Australia wins Automation Impact Award for Plexus Gateway implementation

Miranda Park

Marketing Graduate

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CPA Australia has received the 25th Australasian Shared Services & Outsourcing Week’s (SSOW) Automation Impact Award for their implementation and use of contract and workflow automation platform Plexus Gateway. The awards took place on Wednesday the 22nd of June for the Australian chapter of the world’s largest Shared Service and Outsourcing Network (SSON). SSON’s Impact Awards represent the highest level of recognition for the impact shared services have on enterprise and are a chance to recognise and celebrate the achievements of both captive shared service and outsourcing partnerships.

CPA Australia introduced Plexus Gateway to improve the legal advice and contract execution process from a “complicated, impossible to track, and incredibly lengthy paper-based system”, to a simple contracting process complete with time-saving business self-service and a centralised contract repository.

CPA Australia found the execution process surrounding contracts too slow, and the Legal function found they were engaged by stakeholders late in the process, creating unnecessary risk, time management pressure and potential compliance issues. The Legal team identified an opportunity to improve internal communication and create efficiencies across the business by automating the drafting, approval, execution, storage and life cycle management of contracts across the entire organisation. Further, the Legal team were becoming disengaged from spending the bulk of their time reviewing high volume/low value contracts.

Through the implementation of Plexus Gateway, CPA Australia have simplified and automated their contracting process, allowing the business users to self-serve throughout the entire end to end process of contract generation. This automation immediately alerts Legal when contracts hit certain risk triggers and may require modifications or additional input or negotiation from Legal. By ensuring all contracts are created, negotiated, reviewed and stored in one platform, Plexus Gateway has provided a one-stop-shop for all business contracting needs.

The time saved has created more capacity for value adding activities for legal, and faster execution for the business. The Legal team is no longer consumed by a vast number of high volume and low value agreements, they have more capacity to act on larger and more strategically important matters and are engaged by the business on these more important tasks earlier.

The Legal team's engagement and culture scores have progressively improved following the introduction of Plexus, now ranked amongst the equal best in the business. The success of Plexus Gateway automation within the business has led CPA to expand their automation scope with a plan to automate more documents within Plexus Gateway, including a non-Legal owned document.

CPA Australia’s Plexus Gateway implementation was led by Warren Slade, Deputy General Counsel, Greta Walters, Legal Counsel, and Michelle Sodhi, Legal Counsel, who have worked in partnership with Plexus to deliver a seamless legal automation project. The awards ceremony was attended by Slade and Walters from CPA Australia who accepted the award on behalf of both CPA and Plexus. Slade expressed that it was a “wonderful recognition for the CPA Australia legal team and our supportive and hard working business partners Plexus.”

Nav Thomas, the ​​Customer Success Director at Plexus said that the “partnership with CPA is a prime example of how successful a software rollout can be when there is a clear alignment on the vision and business goals.” Thomas further shared that he is “ecstatic to see that CPA won an award that recognises the importance of thinking outside the box when trying to innovate, but having seen their commitment to getting the fundamentals right for driving large scale change, it comes as no surprise.”

Founded in 1886, CPA Australia is one of the largest professional accounting bodies in the world. Now with more than 170,000 members in over 100 countries, supported by 19 offices globally, CPA Australia delivers education, training, technical support and advocacy to members worldwide.

Plexus Gateway gives in-house Legal teams the tools they need to deliver faster, better and more cost-effective legal support. It enables them to manage risk at speed and reduces external spend while increasing client satisfaction and employee engagement. Plexus Gateway is used by in-house legal teams at over 200 of the world’s largest organisations including L'Oréal, PepsiCo, Woolworths, Deliveroo, Nike, General Mills, Coca Cola and General Motors.