EY OpsChain Contract Manager

What EY can do for you

Procurement is the primary function through which organizations interact with external business partners. While supplier and buyer networks alike have become increasingly complex, the technology used to manage these networks is based on legacy applications and processes. The result? Procurement teams are very good at negotiating agreements but struggle to effectively execute them. 

Historically, legal, procurement, supply chain and finance have all operated in a loosely-coupled and internally optimized environment inside the enterprise; and traditional ERP systems struggle to handle business rules and volume discounts in procurement across multiple divisions, subsidiaries, and partners. The complexity of today’s contract execution requirements creates a material amount of contract leakage for large organizations, resulting in a gap between negotiated and realized savings.

Organizations lose on average​ 12% of the value expected from procurement contracts due to “hard” leakage (e.g. invoicing errors and incorrect pricing). In addition, mergers and acquisitions, outsourcing and globalization have also made managing direct procurement relationships more complex. 

Blockchain technology makes it possible to integrate all the parties into a single digital environment, significantly speeding up process cycle time and reducing costs. It allows companies to knit together extended business networks while compartmentalizing private information on terms and conditions, and discounts.​

EY OpsChain Contract Manager, delivered through a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model on blockchain.ey.com, helps organizations run end-to-end procurement activities using tokens and smart contracts on a public blockchain network. It reduces the complexity created by extended business networks, fragmented IT systems and variable procurement agreements.

The benefits of EY OpsChain Contract Manager include:

• Improved ability to negotiate agreements globally and execute locally
• Increased transparency across supplier network
• Elimination of manual reconciliations
• Automated contract execution
• Ability to leverage one single, immutable version of the truth for authorized stakeholders
• Increased data accuracy and analytics
• Integrated siloed systems into one environment

The return on investment for automating smart contracts is increasingly well understood. Microsoft’s expected benefits from implementing a blockchain-based solution for gaming rights and royalties management for its Xbox video game network is one of the most impactful case examples – EY OpsChain Contract Manager helped cut access to royalties from 45 days to 4 minutes.