Noumi: Milking Maximum Legal Contract Value Using Plexus

Key Outcomes

• Enabled a legal team of five to streamline contract management across eight brands through one platform

• Established complete record keeping of all legal work collateral

• Average contract execution time now 4 hours; Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs) executed as quickly as 1.5 hours

• Executed 17 different contract and document types over 1300 times within 3 years of implementation

• Plans to expand technology capabilities by creating automated processes

Customer Overview

Noumi is the name behind many of Australia’s most popular dairy, plant-based milk and nutritional products, including Milklab, Australia’s Own and Crankt. The company’s international FMCG and retail presence has swelled in recent years, necessitating the implementation of a contract management system that has enabled a lean legal team to take on full-fat volumes of paperwork.

Thanks to Plexus, Noumi’s Legal team is able to handle everyday contracting and automate complex delegations of authority within the platform, resulting in a single source of truth the entire organisation can rely on. The legal team is managing their workload without unnecessary complexity or “red tape” and is currently expanding their use of Plexus to automate standardised contracting processes.

What Needed to Get Done

Noumi’s small legal team deals with contracts day in, day out across eight different brands globally, for everything from marketing campaigns to supplier agreements. Prior to implementing Plexus, keeping track of contracts (often held in different repositories) and admin throughout the contract lifecycle was causing unnecessary delay and additional work for the team.

With the implementation of Plexus, it was easy for the Legal team to keep track of all contracts and to ensure that all contracts not only go through Legal before execution but are stored in a central location. It became easier for the team to monitor compliance with the Delegation of Authority policy and to manage the contract lifecycle, especially at the signing stage.

“We love that the system’s workflow is able to work side-by-side with our internal policies and delegations of authority,” says Justin Coss, Noumi General Counsel.

How Plexus Helps

Using an inadequate technology solution was a frustration that Noumi Legal Counsel Pat Datt was all too familiar with. After using a purpose-built in-house system at a previous counsel role that was “not very consumer friendly”, being able to switch to Plexus was a “breath of fresh air”.

“It’s been extremely helpful having a usable platform,” says Datt. “The Plexus team has been excellent at supporting the implementation of Plexus.”

“Noumi has been great at identifying where and how they want to use Plexus to enable their small legal team to complete a formidable volume of work relative to their size,” says Lloyd Smith, Customer Success Manager.

Enablement and Execution

Despite having a legal team of only five – one of them being a university intern – Noumi has been able to keep on top of their contracting. Contract execution is only taking about 4 hours, with NDAs signed off in as quickly as 1.5 hours from authoring to signature stages.

“Plexus helps alleviate the workload of our legal team by stopping us from being the bottleneck in executing simple tasks that would otherwise take time.”

Justin Coss, Noumi General Counsel

The approval function within Plexus has been vital for senior Legal team members like Datt to minimise risk from their juniors while drastically reducing back-and-forth correspondence.

“Our juniors can upload their negotiated contracts into Plexus for me to approve. I can easily approve it or send it back with comments and feedback before going to the next stage and signing. It saves us a lot of email communications and I’m less likely to miss an approval request in my inbox – on a good day I get 40 or 50 other emails,” says Datt.

“We’ll also save a lot of things on Plexus that are not contracts. For example, I recently saved a non-renewal notice, so we’re going to start keeping everything on there as a record.”

Since implementing Plexus just under three years ago, Noumi has executed 17 types of regularly used contracts and documents over 1300 times. The greatest benefit of using Plexus for Noumi is being able to store everything within the platform, allowing for complete, traceable audit trails and visibility of workflows.

“If I left Noumi tomorrow, the team would be able to see everything I’ve done on Plexus and I think is an extremely useful part of the platform. If we were still doing things on email, my inbox could be deactivated and we’d lose all of that work. Keeping our documents and logging our activity within Plexus makes us more risk averse and risk aware,” says Datt.

“The other excellent thing about Plexus is the reminders that we put on our contracts so we know what’s coming up for renewal, especially those that auto-renew, in case we don’t want to renew. From a legal and financial perspective, that’s a risk we have to be aware of.”

The user-friendly counterparty portal has also prevented bottlenecking during contract negotiation and approval phases.

Growing the Relationship

When it came to renewal time, Noumi scoped out some other vendors that were now in market, but Plexus’ great customer service and consistent support made continuing the relationship a no-brainer.

“We found that Plexus was a leader in being able to meet our needs not only from the in-house team but the wider organisation. Because we operate in so many jurisdictions globally, everyone’s become familiar with it.”

Pat Datt, Noumi Legal Counsel

“The Plexus Customer Success team is able to help with any issues and make sure that the platform is responsive to our business needs as they continue to change,” says Coss.

Automation is up next for the Noumi team, as creating a repeatable process of their commonly used contracts such as supplier-distributor agreements for retailers and cafes will streamline Legal’s work even further. While reducing the amount of human handling and routine steps can reduce risk, Noumi has ensured work still passes Legal’s eyes, just in case.

“Our key contracts are going to be automated where the user can populate all of the information; it will go to Legal for a brief review and then we will forward that straight into approval and finally, signing. That means the record stays on Plexus from beginning to end rather than relying on Legal uploading a finalised contract,” says Datt.