NetApp analyzes 90,000+ contracts and reports $2.5M+ saved with Workday Contract Intelligence

NetApp, like many companies, struggled to get insights from its contracts quickly. Projects were outsourced to legal service providers using manual processes, and whenever new information surfaced during an extensive review the team was back to square one. COVID-19 then created supply bottlenecks: NetApp needed to know which customers would accept partial shipments and what recourse it had with key suppliers, but its agreements had not been tagged for "partial delivery" terms and it had tens of thousands of contracts to review.

NetApp used Workday Contract Intelligence, powered by Evisort AI, for AI-driven text mining: a "Google-like" search across all of its contracts. Workday says the legal team trained the AI tool within a week and searched the whole contract repository for partial-shipment provisions. By pairing expiration dates with partial-shipment language, a cross-functional team filtered for contracts up for renewal within 90 days and prioritized less-favorable agreements for renegotiation. NetApp has since used contract extraction AI and automated workflow technology on further projects, including corporate entity changes, post-M&A activity and data privacy analysis.

Workday's page reports 90,000 contracts analyzed, $2.5M+ saved by automating review and thousands of hours saved. The savings span several corporate initiatives since COVID-19, not one project, and the page gives no baseline. The partial-shipment search cut 24,000 contracts down to 600, with 90 different variations of partial-shipment provisions, in a matter of days, and let NetApp invoice for partial shipments while maintaining customer satisfaction. The VP Law, Technology, and Operations says: "You can't be a best-in-class legal department without introducing and becoming comfortable with AI technology. You just can't do it."

• Contracts not tagged for a key term are slow to query when that term suddenly matters: NetApp's agreements had not been tagged for "partial delivery" when supply disruptions began.
• Search found relevant language in unexpected places: "some customers articulated this issue in a different way than we expected."
• Pairing clause search with expiration dates let the team pick contracts renewing within 90 days for renegotiation.
• The savings Workday reports come from several projects over time, not a single deployment.