Client Overview

The client is one of the leading innovation-driven pharmaceutical companies in the APAC region, which has a history of working in synergy with its global network of technology and commercialization partners to develop and market unique, safe therapeutic compounds and products using ingredients from natural resources.

Business Challenge

The client had automated their business processes using Salesforce CRM and Force.com platform. One of the automated processes included processing of agreements for the Legal department. The customer account and contact information was captured in the system. The details of the agreements and the links to the actual contract documents were captured in the Legal Department section and workflows were set for email notification for account creation and other processes.

There was a need to systematically monitor the progress of each contractual document and obtain a clear snapshot of ongoing contract negotiations and the status of each contract.

• The client needed an ability to track the progress of each contract through different stages. Each stage would have predefined timelines and an email notification was to be sent in the event of failing to meet the set timelines.

• The target date according to the timeline of each stage completion was to consider only business days i.e. excluding the holidays.

• The Email notification needs to be repeated every three-business days until the stage changed/ progressed.

• A Requesting User should be able to change the target date on case-to-case basis. Additionally, Requesting User should also have a facility to put the contract on hold or in abandon stage at any point in time with appropriate comments.

• Any stage changes need to be logged in the activity log and shown on the legal department page as a separate section.

• Tracking reports need to be generated for MIS purposes.

Technical Requirements

• Visualforce

• Apex

Solution Strategy

Eternus Solutions provided a robust solution in the form of Contract Repository System. Some of the key features that were developed were –

• An agreement’s progress was to be tracked through the business rules of the Legal department. This gave flexibility to the user to update or set new business rules for tracking the agreements.

• Requestor would set the current stage of the agreement. System would then calculate the Target date i.e. expected date of stage completion of the stage based on the timelines set for the particular agreement type and the current stage. System would consider only business days for calculating the date i.e. holidays were to be ignored.

• The Target Date field was kept as editable, therefore providing the requestor with flexibility to manually change the target date as per his convenience on case-to-case basis.

• System would check for the stage and the target date every day. On reaching the target date, email notification were sent to the requestor or the owner of the activity depending upon the stage.

• Once the notification was sent, system would increase the target date by 3 working days on which the notification would be repeated, if the stage was not changed. Notification repeat interval was configurable and could be changed by the system admin user.

• Each change of the stage was logged in Activity History object, which had custom fields such as requestor, comments, etc. This activity log was visible to the user in the related lists section of the Legal department page.

• A report was provided for tracking the stage wise number of open agreements, total time consumed for closing the agreements and stage wise breakup of the same.

Development Methodology

• Development on Developer Sandbox

• SRS and Design documents to start building any new components

• Designing and developing workflows for various processes

• Extensive usage of Trigger, Classes, Batch Apex and Schedulers to write custom logic

• Data Tool Configuration using standard editor

• Coding using SFDC standards and best practices