A global pharmaceutical company with $40 billion in revenue was managing procurement through email chains, Word documents, and spreadsheets — losing months to vendor onboarding, burying legal risks in attachments, and bleeding money through manual errors. We built ePAL: a procurement automation system that answers simple questions to generate contracts, automates due diligence, and reduced vendor onboarding from six months to two weeks.
Novo Nordisk — the Danish pharmaceutical giant behind Ozempic and Wegovy, with over 77,000 employees and operations spanning the globe — was running procurement the way most large organizations do: through email. Contracts lived in attachments. Approvals happened in reply chains. Due diligence documents scattered across shared drives. And the consequences were measured in months and millions.
The tools used in contract management before modern automation — emails, Word documents, spreadsheets, and cloud storage — don't support the level of collaboration and visibility that procurement requires. Contracts sitting in forgotten shared drives create surprise renewals with unfavorable terms. Manual invoice matching means missed early-pay discounts. And every delay weakens your bargaining position with vendors.
For a pharmaceutical company operating under strict regulatory requirements, the stakes are even higher. Vendor due diligence isn't optional — it's mandatory. But manual due diligence takes 80+ hours per vendor, and at the pace Novo Nordisk was growing, the procurement team simply couldn't keep up. New vendor relationships that should fuel innovation were instead stuck in a six-month approval queue.
Research shows manual procurement processes take an average of 25.6 days just to onboard a single supplier. The internal cost per vendor can reach $250 — before you've even started doing business together.
Vendor onboarding — including due diligence, contract negotiation, and approval — was taking six months. Strategic partnerships stalled. Innovation slowed. Competitors moved faster.
Contract terms buried in email attachments meant legal risks went unreviewed. Non-standard clauses slipped through. Compliance gaps accumulated invisibly until they became audit findings.
Manual data entry across disconnected systems created costly mistakes — pricing errors, incorrect terms, duplicate payments. Errors that weren't caught until reconciliation, if they were caught at all.
Automate the complex. Keep the interface simple.
Replace blank-page contract drafting with guided questionnaires. Users answer simple business questions; the system generates compliant contracts with appropriate terms, clauses, and approvals automatically selected.
Automated workflows launch legal, finance, and compliance reviews simultaneously rather than sequentially. When a vendor submits documentation, all reviewers work in parallel — eliminating weeks of handoff delays.
Replace email threads with real-time collaborative contract review. All stakeholders see the same document, comment in context, and track changes with full audit trail — no more version confusion.
DocuSign integration for electronic signatures eliminates the print-sign-scan-email cycle. Contracts execute in hours instead of weeks, with legally binding signatures and automatic filing to SAP.
ePAL transforms procurement from a manual, error-prone process into an automated workflow that guides users from initial request through executed contract. The advanced workflow engine handles the complexity behind the scenes while presenting users with simple, straightforward interfaces.
Contract generation starts with business questions, not legal templates. Users describe what they need — the type of engagement, the value, the timeline, the risk factors — and ePAL assembles the appropriate contract with pre-approved clauses, required reviews, and proper approval routing. Legal reviews only the exceptions, not every standard agreement.
RFP management brings structure to vendor selection. Requirements, responses, and evaluations all live in one system with consistent scoring and automated comparison. Due diligence management tracks every document, every verification, every approval — ensuring nothing falls through the cracks while dramatically accelerating the timeline.
Deep SAP integration means procurement data flows directly into financial systems. No re-keying. No reconciliation gaps. Purchase orders, invoices, and payments all trace back to their source contracts with complete audit trails. The system that generates the contract is the same system that tracks its execution.
New vendor onboarding including full due diligence reduced from six months to two weeks — a 92% reduction in cycle time.
Over $1 million in material errors identified and corrected in the first year through automated validation and reconciliation.
More than 250 legal risks identified and addressed in the first six months through systematic contract review and clause validation.
Complete integration with SAP for seamless data flow from contract through payment with full audit trail.
Answer business questions, get compliant contracts — with appropriate clauses, terms, and approval workflows automatically configured.
Structured due diligence workflows with parallel reviews, document tracking, and automatic escalation for incomplete items.
DocuSign integration for legally binding electronic signatures with automatic routing and SAP filing upon execution.
Structured vendor selection with consistent requirements, automated scoring, and complete audit trail from RFP through award.
"We went from spending months chasing approvals through email to having contracts generated, reviewed, and executed in days. The system didn't just speed things up — it caught risks we didn't even know we were taking."
Procurement Director Novo Nordisk
Whether you're drowning in email-based contracts or need to accelerate vendor onboarding, we build procurement systems that actually work.
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