SmarTek21 Transforms Document Management Capabilities Of Amazon’s Legal And Finance Department
Solution Added Real-time Reporting Capabilities During Unprecedented Time of Rapid Expansion
Executive Summary
The Legal and Finance Team within Amazon’s Retail Distribution organization had a complicated process for vendor and document management, including workflows that alternately had multiple tech platforms while others that still used non-digital paperwork. The result was a poorly performing business function unable to meet mission-critical deadlines to the extent it was hampering legal and financial filings, contracts negotiations, and construction management deadlines with the potential of costing tens of millions in overruns and lost business.
SmarTek21 was able to develop new processes and tools that:
- Provided real-time visibility to executives on the overall state of Amazon’s investments in their distribution infrastructure, reducing the time to make key decisions from days to hours
- Reclaiming an average of 2 hours per person per week across both legal and tax groups
- Improving accuracy, reducing more than $10M USD annually in contract terms, fees, and erroneous renewals
- Reduced redundant contracts by 50%, consolidated vendors and improved overall ROI by 200%
CUSTOMER CHALLENGE
Amazon’s Legal and Finance Team had a complicated, multi-platform, legacy process around vendor and document management with vestiges of non-digital paperwork remaining in the workflow. Overall, the existing process had a formative, net-negative impact on the speed of information and communication with internal teams and their customers. Overall the ability to efficiently and accurately meet mission-critical deadlines suffered, resulting in repeated, random missteps to projects; and build timelines suffered.
- Issues indicated that an incomplete view of contract documents through the workflow and non-integrated toolset was hampering legal and financial filings, contracts negotiations and construction management deadlines throughout the project life cycle
- Leaders working to complete projects on a tight timetable continued to stress the current process, which had the potential of costing tens of millions in, overruns and lost business.
OUR APPROACH
SmarTek21 provided Amazon’s Retail Distribution Legal and Finance Leaders with a comprehensive technical and workflow analysis of the legacy processes and architecture. In the process, concerns were validated while new dependencies and risks were discovered accompanied by a set of recommendations.
Our Lead Architect designed and developed a customized interface portal as a POC with the bandwidth to handle a large volume of more than 20,000 vendors and legal contracts with full data integration, enterprise-wide search, and a new taxonomy. Once approved for production release, our on-site Data Engineering and Solutions Teams integrated with Amazon technical leads to execute a unified high-octane Managed Service program.
SmartTek21’s Solutions Engineering Leadership delivered an entirely new system, going live within three months of the approved design.
2%
Reclaiming An Average Of 2 Hours Per Person Per Week Across Both Legal And Tax Groups
10%
Improving Accuracy, Reducing More Than $10M USD Annually In Contract Terms, Fees, And Erroneous Renewals
200%
Reduced Redundant Contracts By 50%, Consolidated Vendors And Improved Overall ROI By 200%
RESULTS
SmarTek21 was able to develop new processes and tools that:
- Provided real-time visibility to executives on the overall state of Amazon’s investments in their distribution infrastructure, reducing the time to make key decisions from days to hours
- Reclaiming an average of 2 hours per person per week across both legal and tax groups
- Improving accuracy, reducing more than $10M USD annually in contract terms, fees, and erroneous renewals
- Reduced redundant contracts by 50%, consolidated vendors and improved overall ROI by 200%
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