ENGIE Australia: Powering contract lifecycle management

04 October 2024

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Key Outcomes

  • Successfully implemented a company-wide contract review, approval and signature system, replacing previous paper-based methods

  • Established secure digital contract and document storage

  • Successfully adopted company-wide use of Plexus for over 320 users

  • Reduced contract execution time to 4.5 hours

  • Scaled up contract and document execution by 50% year-over-year

Sourcing the Problem

ENGIE’s Australian business includes a portfolio of gas-fired generation, renewable energy assets and development pipeline, retail business and large-scale rehabilitation of the former Hazelwood Power Station and mine. The sum total of its efforts are to accelerate the energy transition, and as these ambitions grow, so does the volume of documents requiring Legal attention across the business.

Seeking out software solutions to manage administrative processes in the business is not new to ENGIE Australia. After identifying their business challenge, General Counsel Lawrence Kim and Head of Legal Andrew Chan took the opportunity to champion company wide Plexus usage to capably handle their increased workload efficiently with minimal risk.

Legal handles many different types of contracts and documents covering energy supply, project development and asset operations. The variety and complexity of documents were for a long time being manually processed and stored using pen, paper and filing cabinets. Digital ways of working were, for a long time, suboptimal.

The advent of working from home policies post-2020 also regularly resulted in contract execution delays due to pending physical signature requirements. ENGIE Australia Legal needed a contract management solution to ease their legal drag and get things moving quicker through the business. 

We identified this real need to capture our contract approval cycle,” says Chan. We had some manual systems in place to work around that, but they were proving less than ideal.”

Kim and Chan also needed their chosen solution to be worth the commitment of implementing as they prepared to scale up their legal support during ENGIE Australia’s continual growth.

We were very mindful not to go to a platform and make everyone go through a laborious onboarding process that had no integration with what they were doing,” says Chan.

Switching on the Solution

Since revamping their processes with Plexus’ Contract Management solution, the ENGIE Australia legal team now has complete visibility of all the business’s contracts and workflows. They can also easily find current and legacy documents using Plexus as their centralised storage system.

Our people previously were either storing things on local and network drives. We now have a platform where people can get things approved, executed and stored under a single, user-friendly digital platform, which we’ve never really had before. I think it’s been excellent.”

Lawrence Kim, ENGIE Australia General Counsel

While adopting technology is often a venture filled with unknowns, especially for legal functions not used to leading the charge for company-wide technology adoption, ENGIE Australia Legal had a head start. The company had already begun implementing software to enhance their remote work capabilities in other departments, so they were primed to continue adopting new tools for specific processes. 

While the intent from the wider business was there, Kim and Chan knew they had to lead by example in order to successfully embed Plexus as part of the ENGIE Australia contract workflow. They updated their contract management processes with the support of the Australian executive team, mandating any contracts to be submitted via Plexus for Legal approval and signing.

People would send documents to try to get it approved through other means, but the legal team would always ensure they were doing it using Plexus,” says Chan. We also send links to our intranet to onboard them with the contract approval and execution process, so that was really helpful for them.”

With time and persistence, using Plexus was not just simply developing a good habit, but an integral step in the contract approval and signing process.

Staying Plugged in with Plexus

Today, ENGIE Australia has over 300 users across 13 department groups using Plexus. Because the organisation has integrated the platform into their contract workflow process, Chan explains that most people that engage with contracts in any way like signing or negotiating will have an engagement with Plexus.”

The commitment to using Plexus for their contracts has enabled ENGIE Australia Legal to have adequate oversight over contracts going through the business. With average workflow execution time sitting at 4.5 hours, their day is no longer derailed by admin, churn work and last-minute requests. The reduced contract execution time has since enabled ENGIE Australia’s Legal team to comfortably handle a 50% year-over-year increase in execution volume.

Plexus has reduced friction points that Legal and the broader business had with administrative work. We’ve got more comfort about our documents getting signed and stored properly. Sometimes we don’t have to touch them again, which is great.”

Andrew Chan, ENGIE Australia Head of Legal

ENGIE Australia’s Legal team is always looking for ways to increase the efficiency of their work and is working closely with Plexus to optimise the way they use the platform. Otherwise, it’s business as usual for Kim and team as they power on with their legal work.

And how does the business feel about Plexus? Kim is pleased to report the feedback that we’ve had on Plexus has been overwhelmingly positive. In fact, I don’t know anyone who’s got any negative views on it at all.”

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Plexus helps everyone in your business execute legal tasks with certainty and speed. Build self-service workflows for routine legal tasks, accelerate your contract lifecycle, and bring clarity, transparency and swift resolutions to legal matters.

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