The overall ease of accessibility of these metrics doesn't only improve the current contracting process but helps to identify objectives and expediencies in the contracting process moving forward.
In late 2022, the Office of Management and Enterprise Services (OMES), which oversees all procurement for the State of Oklahoma, embarked on an ambitious journey to modernize how it handles procurement contracts and legal reviews. What started as a search for a better contract management system has evolved into a transformative shift in how the state’s procurement and legal teams collaborate on everything from routine purchase orders to complex statewide technology contracts.
For an agency processing thousands of contracts annually through both its procurement division and legal department, the stakes were high—and the results have exceeded expectations, ultimately saving thousands of taxpayer dollars and countless work hours.
Mounting challenges on legacy systems
Before 2022, OMES’s legal team, responsible for reviewing all procurement contracts, managed their entire review process through Microsoft Planner—a system that required a lot of manual tracking. The procurement team, meanwhile, struggled with tracking contract statuses and getting timely legal feedback on contract terms and conditions.
The legal department found themselves caught in an endless cycle of emails, phone calls, and Microsoft Teams messages with both procurement officers and vendors. These communications then had to be manually transferred into Planner for record-keeping, a process that was often incomplete. Procurement management frequently struggled to determine where contracts stood in the legal review process, and tracking procurement statistics required separate, time-consuming manual entry into Excel spreadsheets by both teams.
The challenges were particularly acute when trying to maintain consistent communication between procurement officers, legal reviewers, and vendors. Notes from legal reviews weren’t always transposed properly, leaving procurement management unable to easily determine a project’s status or respond to vendor inquiries.
The search for a modern solution
In 2022, OMES’s procurement division initiated a competitive bid process for a legal case management system. They needed a solution that could increase overall velocity, visibility, and efficiency in their contracting process while improving coordination between procurement officers and legal reviewers. After evaluating various options, they selected Ironclad, a contract lifecycle management (CLM) software with built-in AI capabilities.
The decision was driven by the need for a system that could handle the complexities of government procurement while maintaining transparency between teams. OMES found particular value in Ironclad’s ability to maintain separate yet connected channels for procurement officers, legal reviewers, and external vendors—a crucial feature for government contracting.
Implementation success
The implementation of Ironclad transformed OMES’s contract workflow into four main stages:
- Create/build (handled by procurement)
- Review/manage (coordinated between procurement and legal)
- Signature coordination (managed by procurement)
- Archive (accessible to both teams)
The platform’s centralized approach immediately began showing results for both departments. The new system brought several key improvements:
Enhanced cross-team communication
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- Internal correspondence became viewable by all relevant OMES users while remaining isolated from suppliers
- Procurement officers, technical experts, security representatives, and legal reviewers could all access necessary information in real time
- The teams could now email suppliers directly from Ironclad and view that correspondence in a unified activity feed
- The system maintains confidentiality of legal deliberations while keeping procurement officers informed of progress
Streamlined document management
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- Legal team can track all contract versions automatically
- Procurement officers can compare new versions with old versions
- Legal reviewers can make changes via approved changes, manual edits, or merge updates from redlines with a single click
- Legal team can rewrite entire paragraphs using integrated generative AI
- Procurement team can automate basic data entry through built-in conditions and tracking fields
Automated workflow features
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- Procurement submissions automatically route to the cyber security team when a review involves accessing, processing, storing, or transmitting state data
- System generates appropriate template documents based on procurement type
- Procurement and legal teams can communicate quickly through an integrated message board that sends email notifications to specific users
- Procurement team can link related records internally, allowing data fields to be automatically populated from related documents
AI-powered efficiency
The legal team leverages Ironclad’s AI capabilities to catch inconsistencies in contract language, clauses, and terms, ensuring consistent outcomes across all procurement documents. For example, it enables users to train on the state’s preferred terms without having to worry about it pulling in or identifying another state’s choice of law provisions. Ironclad has proven particularly valuable in several key areas:
Automated alerts and lifecycle management
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- Alerts procurement officers about upcoming opt-out periods
- Notifies both teams about renewal options
- Tracks termination dates for procurement management
- Monitors other important contract management functions that previously required manual tracking by both departments
Data tracking and analysis
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- Monitors any specified data point for both procurement and legal metrics
- Generates associated reports for management oversight
- Creates easy-to-read bar graphs showing supplier response times for procurement planning
- Tracks supplier non-responsiveness requiring workflow cancellation by procurement teams
Personnel transition management
When staff changes occur in either department, new team members can quickly get up to speed by reviewing the activity feed, eliminating the need to sort through countless emails to understand the contract’s history.
Legal and procurement are better together
Since November 2023, the collaboration between procurement and legal teams through Ironclad has produced substantial time savings in contract execution from start to signature:
- Information technology statewide RFPs: 58.3% time reduction
- Agency RFPs: 52.5% time reduction
- Statewide contract orders: 29.2% time reduction
Total financial savings to date: $66k+
Digging into the data
The platform has revolutionized how both procurement and legal teams handle contract metadata and analysis. The system now allows both departments to easily answer critical questions such as:
- How many contracts have reduced insurance requirements?
- When does a particular supplier’s certificate of insurance expire?
- Which suppliers are most and least responsive during the negotiating process?
- When did a supplier last have its security assessment completed, and is it up to date?
The system also provides valuable insights into supplier performance, generating easy-to-read bar graphs showing response times and tracking instances where contract workflows had to be canceled due to non-responsiveness—information that helps both procurement and legal teams optimize their processes.
Transferability and scalability
One of the most promising aspects of the Ironclad implementation is its potential for broader use across Oklahoma’s government entities. The system offers:
- Customizable contract workflows that procurement and legal teams can adapt to specific agency needs
- AI training capabilities that legal teams can tailor to recognize state-specific preferred terms
- Scalability to accommodate municipalities, counties, and special districts accessing OMES’s Central Purchasing division
- The ability for procurement teams to export and share contract workflows between agencies, saving significant setup time
What’s next?
OMES procurement and legal leadership see their current success as just the beginning. “We are only in the early stages of implementing and perfecting this new procurement tool yet have already accomplished a great deal,” the team notes. They anticipate that the improvements in business processes and automation will continue to increase year over year.
The teams look forward to opportunities for further success, such as:
- Further customizing AI capabilities to state-specific legal requirements
- Expanding the system’s use across more state agency procurement departments
- Developing more sophisticated metrics and performance indicators for both procurement and legal processes
- Creating additional automated workflows for different contract types
The improvements in business processes and automation that will be effectuated through analysis of the metrics and performance indicators are still in their infancy, but the total savings and increases in efficiency are slated to increase year over year for the foreseeable future.
As OMES continues to refine the use of this innovative contracting system, its procurement and legal teams remain excited about the benefits it will provide to both OMES and the State of Oklahoma as a whole. The transformation represents not just a technological upgrade, but a fundamental shift in how state procurement and legal review processes can operate in the modern era.
For a deeper dive on how Ironclad’s AI-powered contracting can transform procurement and legal at your organization, request a demo today.
