Situation

A large subsidiary of the group, was being sold to a foreign bank. As this was the foreign bank’s first operational presence in Europe, it was critical that the group could continue to deliver services through a Temporary Service Agreement (TSA) while the subsidiary and foreign bank built up their own capabilities. To ensure that all necessary services could continue to be delivered, agreements with suppliers had to be in place before the date of closure (transfer of ownership of the company) to allow the sold subsidiary to continue using the group’s agreements for a period of 12, 24, or 30 months (depending on the category) at no additional cost.

Objective and deliverable

Continued service delivery for services under TSA

Minimize costs of de-scaling operations. 

Challenges

Unify two non-matching contract management datasets from two different contract management systems and reconcile them with spend data.

Capacity and expertise of the legal team, contract management team, and buyers.

The legal team had to support the analysis of many contracts and interpret transition clauses.

The subsidiary completely managed an important category: market data, and capacity and capability had to be built up within the group. The legal expertise for these contracts was also with the subsidiary.

Managing progress and up-to-date progress reporting and flagging of issues: Finding and implementing a way to manage the day-to-day details and provide high-level management reporting.

Approach

Analyze which agreements were shared by the subsidiary and other businesses in the group. The analysis was presented 6 weeks after the start of the assignment.

Manage the process of getting the agreements with vendors in place by the date of closure through the contract managers and buyers who held the contacts with those vendors.

We agreed on the steps for the process and implemented them into a project management system (Azure DevOps) and a PowerBI dashboard (on top of it) for reporting. This helped to:

Create transparency on the status and progress of getting agreements in place.

Have an overview of expected workload in each stage to allow for planning ahead.

Save time by eliminating the need to manually create multiple dashboards every week, as real-time information on status was

Key learnings and solution

Result