Sony Pictures Networks India Transforms with Conga CLM

Culver Max Entertainment Private Limited also commonly known as Sony Pictures Network India (SPNI) is an indirect wholly owned subsidiary of Japan’s Sony Group Corporation. SPNI operates 26 TV channels, a streaming digital platform (Sony LIV), and creates original television content at Studio NEXT. The company serves upwards of over 700 million viewers through diverse offerings in general entertainment, movies, sports, digital, and content production.

Challenge

SPNI buys, sells, and distributes content, issuing close to 3000 contracts per year. Contracts vary in complexity, depending on the project, and require input from multiple departments to execute.

One of the main challenges SPNI faced was a high contract turnaround time of up to three months per contract. The company also had challenges with collaboration throughout the contracting process. Though multiple departments needed to provide input on most contracts, there wasn’t an adept system in place to move contracts between departments, which contributed to higher turnaround time.

To address these issues, SPNI wanted a solution that would increase operational efficiency and data governance, so they sought a partner that could help reduce the complexity of the contracting process, configure a solution that met their unique needs, and standardize documents where possible—with the end goal of lowering turnaround time.

Solution

SPNI has embarked on a transformative journey towards establishing a digitally driven business model. Guided by their four-pillar approach, aptly named BODG - encompassing Business Growth, Operational Efficiency, Data Driven Decision Making, and Governance, the company set out to achieve revenue optimization, streamlined operations, collaborative data collection, and enhanced corporate governance. As SPNI moved forward with its BODG approach to digital transformation, contract lifecycle management was identified as a key priority.

To meet the Company’s business initiatives, we chose Conga CLM as our solution to transform our contracting process. Conga CLM had the features that would benefit all four pillars of the BODG model and touch every part of the business’s value chain while allowing us flexibility and configurability across our business processes.

Raj Mohan Srinivasan

Chief Information Officer

Culver Max Entertainment Private Limited

In less than 12-months after selecting Conga CLM, SPNI has full, customized functionality across all departments with users achieving significant results.

Conga CLM allowed SPNI to implement several productivity-enhancing features.

Contract request forms (CRFs) can now be cloned for reuse in similar situations, rather than creating new documents.
Both sell-side and buy-side contracts are automated.
The approval workflow is now fully automated, with intelligent routing rules and automatic timestamping of contracts, allowing users to track contracts at every stage.
Stored contracts now include information such as version control, comments, and metadata to easily search for fields, terms, and clauses.

An important feature of Conga CLM was its democratization of contract administration. Since relevant team members could view the working contract, it became a collaborative process.

Flexibility was important to SPNI, and Conga CLM delivered. The company was able to set up a customization to split the contract request form feature between legal, finance, and commercial teams to collaboratively create the Contract Requisition Form (CRF) and get sign-offs, by the teams. “The CRF is a very important feature for me,” says CIO, Raj Mohan Srinivasan, “because this is one area where I wanted to have collaboration.”

Another important feature of Conga CLM was the ability to create templates for CRFs and contracts with standard terms and conditions and using smart clauses and conditional logic to account for the variations instead of a single document for every need.

One of the most important features is standardization. In the first year with Conga CLM, we implemented 190 contract types, configured 46 CRFs, and over 80 templates.

Raj Mohan Srinivasan

Chief Information Officer

Culver Max Entertainment Private Limited

Having achieved initial success with the consolidation of templates in the first year, Srinivasan doesn’t want to stop there. He envisions a path forward for SPNI that involves sustained efforts to optimize and further streamline the necessary templates. His goal is to significantly simplify their business processes, driving towards greater efficiency and effectiveness.

Conga CLM enables this through customizable dashboards, allowing stakeholders to view where the contract is at any given moment. Conga CLM also captures timestamps on documents and delivers transparent and detailed turnaround-time reporting.