Conga: Automating Document and Contract Processes using AI

Christopher Bradman, APAC Regional Director

Creating documents and rekeying information manually was once a common practice among businesses. Such manual processes and documentation consumed a great deal of time and proved expensive for organizations. With a major office in Sydney, Conga was founded in 2006 as a solution to eliminate manual documentation and initially offered cost-saving automation to generate documents merely at the push of a button. Later, owing to the increasing pace of businesses, the company ventured into delivering an all-inclusive solution for making organizations smarter and efficient. “To stay ahead of the competition and ensure the business is operating to its full potential, procurement and contracts technology must evolve to include the digital transformation of the entire cross-departmental process,” remarks Christopher Bradman, APAC Regional Director at Conga.

The Conga Digital Transformation Suite

Organizations generally rely on “multiple” vendors for the creation of proposals, negotiations, redlining, signing contracts, and various other post-sales processes, thus generating friction between sales, legal and accounting. This not only slows down the solution’s deployment but also complicates the task of maintaining disparate components of the deployed technology as well as managing multiple contracts and relationships with different vendors. As a comprehensive answer to these problems, Conga brings a Digital Transformation Suite that accelerates sales, addresses compliance regulations along with taking into consideration the needs of an entire business lifecycle. “The all-encompassing nature of Conga’s solution eradicates the integration issues associated with consolidating a solution from multiple vendors,” explains Bradman. Apart from being trusted by more than 10,500 customers to overcome business challenges of all kinds, the key factor that differentiates Conga from its competitors is the ability to allow clients to work with a single vendor.

The features of this advanced solution include document creation, negotiation, contract life-cycle management, electronic signature, workflow automation along with input and management of data in a CRM system.

The all-encompassing nature of Conga’s solution eradicates the integration issues associated with consolidating a solution from multiple vendors

These features enable the company’s end-to-end solution to bind all the procurement-centric and cross-departmental business processes together, reducing errors as well as the number of people required to maintain these processes. Thus, Conga’s solution also equips organizations with an ability to expand their business offerings without the necessity of bringing additional people on board.

An Emphasis on Artificial Intelligence

Not only is Conga developing and refining the market’s leading digital transformation suite, but the company is also focused on bringing cutting-edge technology such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to business documents and contracts. Conga is delivering key AI technologies to help companies overcome many of the challenges encountered throughout the contracting process. By infusing cutting-edge AI technology into its entire suite of solutions, Conga is intelligently unlocking the data that resides in documents and contracts to not only make it actionable, but to help users deliver more accurate contract reviews, discover relevant insights, and drive speed to revenue. Through an innovative product strategy, Conga aims to transform the underlying business processes that make an organization more efficient, effective, and compliant.

More recently, incorporating artificial intelligence (AI) into its solution has been Conga’s prime objective. The company has devised an innovative approach to AI, dealing successfully with the tendency of AI to fall apart when paired with irrelevant or insufficient data. In fact, a lack of emphasis on data may lead AI to actually introduce greater risks, along with committing blunders and creating more uncertainties. Taking this into consideration, Conga first converts the unstructured data in contracts into structured data that can be read using AI technology, and further delivers accurate insights into risk assessment and clause recommendations.

The Conga Promise

“To accelerate the implementation and improve the value of our solutions, we start with the Conga Promise that provides a five-star client interaction,” adds Bradman.

This includes a seamless access to the company’s enterprise-grade resources, a highly skilled technical support, and onboarding services to get answers quickly along with the consultative expertise for deployment of solutions within weeks instead of months. Furthermore, Conga adopts a productized approach focused on world-class development with the acquisition of key technologies. This gives a major boost to its digital transformation suite while also ensuring faster deployment. Amassing a plethora of business experiences based on best practices of 10,500 customers and 400 million documents for more than a decade, the company’s technology offers a better way to do business.

Conga’s effectiveness can be further elucidated through a project wherein one of its clients, the Schumacher Group, duplicated data-entry on a large number of complex healthcare PDF and Word forms from Medicare, Medicaid, hospitals, and insurance companies. They required a solution that would enable them to enter data into Salesforce only once and complete the standard government insurance forms as well as the physician certification applications automatically. After evaluating seven different solutions from other Salesforce AppExchange partners, the Schumacher Group favored Conga Composer, a solution that creates and delivers robust, sophisticated documents with ease. By seamlessly merging the data from 47 custom objects into PDF and Word forms, Conga Composer eliminated the manual rekeying of data by the client’s seven full-time employees. In addition, the solution automated the completion of more than 1,400 PDF and Word healthcare forms monthly along with increasing the revenue collection by speeding up the physical certification process with hospitals. Conga also enhanced the recruitment and retention of healthcare professionals by filling forms for them in advance with all the available information.

The company’s primary objective is to meet the needs of its clients as quickly and efficiently as possible, and the Conga team has been assuring the same in all the client associations so far. With global headquarters in Colorado in the U.S., Conga is growing rapidly in APAC as well as EMEA markets and now plans to expand its international presence to accommodate the escalating demands of clients. “We keep learning from the best practices of our 10,500 clients, which leads us to build features and functionalities that are required in the market the most,” elaborates Bradman, emphasizing the company’s productized approach. The company also looks forward to providing new, transformative ways to approach business problems that clients never knew even existed, thus driving overall enhancement of businesses.