Simplify for Success - Conversation with Cash Butler

Cash Butler was on Simplify for Success, a podcast series presented by Meru Data and hosted by Priya Keshav. Cash talked about vendor management within organizations and how it is critical to have holistic KPIs to measure effectiveness. He stressed how open communication and the use of 360-degree feedback can help to improve these programs. Cash also discussed his experiences of how technology helps these programs.

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Transcript:

Priya Keshav:

Hello everyone, welcome to our podcast around simplifying for success. Simplification requires discipline and clarity of thought. This is not often easy in today's rapid-paced work environment. We've invited a few colleagues from the data and information governance space to share their strategies and approaches for simplification.

Today, we will be talking with Cash Butler. Cash is a legal operations and technology consultant. In addition to being a founder of ClariLegal, preferred litigation, legal vendor management platform that matches corporations and law firms with the right vendors who have the right service offering at the right place, he's also a seasoned legal technology innovator. Cash has over 18 years of experience in the legal vertical market primarily working in E-Discovery litigation and compliance. Cash is an expert in legal vendor pricing and project management. We are very excited to have Cash on the call today.

Hi Cash! Thanks for joining us.

Cash Butler:

Hi Priya, nice to be here.

Priya Keshav:

You've had many years of experience in third-party management programs, especially adding technology to streamline third-party management. How do you build a business case for streamlining third-party management? Any tips that you can share?

Cash Butler:

Yeah, sure, and let me give you a little bit more depth. So, I've managed third-party relationships in a number of vertical markets, construction, banking, and fintech, and is legal. And there are all kinds of opportunities to streamline and enhance. The vendor management process and the way I've done it is through business process mapping. Understanding what those processes are to deliver value, but also do some modeling. So, if you don't have, you know, you go from modeling to a pilot customer or pilot project to implementation and then your forecast. How long the return on investment will continue into the future.

Priya Keshav:

How do you balance showing immediate results but also setting expectations that some of these programs, especially to see value in them, might take many years?

Cash Butler:

So, you don't undersell the improvements. You do give conservative improvement benchmarks that are achievable and generally, you don't want to go too low, but you want to go right in the middle, so there are achievable goals that you can show that improvement over time. Then the process doesn't stop there, you're always going to tweak either your process or technology or people to continue that improvement cycle in any type of process, but certainly, in the vendor management process, 360-degree feedback loops are also very important. To make sure that you're working closely with your vendors and ratings, you know having ratings, making sure you're able to show this continuous improvement continuous ROI and what is the actual quality performance of your business partners.

Priya Keshav:

So, you talked a little bit about, you know, setting expectations, breaking them into parts. Looking at, you know, how to set expectations for success, right? So, and you also highlighted a few areas where you can focus to sort of understanding and evaluate your program. So, you know you brought up a good point- Simplifying for success. Essentially, there are two ways to simplify breaking down the parts to reduce complexity or identifying a brand-new innovative way to execute the same task. Would you choose one over the other? Or if you choose both, you know, when do you think the first one breaking down the parts works and when do you think the innovation is a better option?

Cash Butler:

You know that's a great question and it's very interesting. I am a big big fan of breaking down the parts to see what's there. And part of that would be to improve, you know, remove process tasks or to improve process tasks to have a better, faster, cheaper, whatever the result you're looking for improved quality. That said, you also may find during this analysis that there's you know the process is beyond repair, or there are better ways to do things, you know, a new technology comes along. New business practices come along, and you need to keep an open mind and understand, we got to look at this from all angles and I mean the goal is to improve and to get a great return on investment that you know immediately and over time. So, I mean the sort of Big Bang, you know, new innovation thing-it's much more difficult than the breakdown step by step. So, I always start with the step-by-step process understanding, and then you may find some opportunities to do a “Big Bang” improvement that is just something entirely different than optimizing an existing process. And that's where outside vendors are for, the goal is always to simplify, you know, simple is good and it's, you know, through software tools with better user interfaces. It is taking complexity and making it simple as a real value, and speed and efficiencies are a real value. Lots of folks think about return on investment, for instance, lowering your outside vendor spend. Yeah, that's great. That certainly, a value, and it's certainly beneficial, but I found reducing time becoming more efficient, being able to do more with less, making people's lives easier and organizations tasks easier, is the higher value benefit to most companies. And you need to include those benefits as part of your reporting metrics- performance indicators. It's not just about outside spending, it's about the reduction of internal costs. And, you know, doing more with less and in it you know getting better quality results, those are key indicators. You don't want too many KPIs, but you want three to five and they're not just about reducing outside spend.

Priya Keshav:

So, you mentioned some really great points. You know, you want to have KPI’s and they should not just be about cost, they need to be about other things as well. Can you share some examples of how you have simplified whether it's breaking down the parts or by coming up with a completely innovative way to do something? Can you share some examples of how you've simplified and how it's sort of helps you be successful?

Cash Butler:

Sure, so my current company, Clara Legal, we have some software that helps with the RFP process and vendor vetting process, and the procurement function. First, we mapped the process, we understood some of these RFPs took a couple of weeks to do, and then we thought how in heaven's name or what a time sink and it's not just a couple of weeks to do, but a number of people to work on these things. So what we could do to shorten that piece of work without reducing or impacting quality negatively and what we found is we were able to remove some process steps and use technology to really speed up the process. So, you could put in your job, you get an RFP back within hours. We embed and make it easier, not just for the person putting in the work at the corporation but also for the vendors to reply and we've put in some business rules that allow for a better apples-to-apples comparison. So, what used to take two weeks, three weeks, four weeks, you know 5 to 10 resources on the buy and the sell, we now can do in a couple of hours. And breaking down the process, removing inefficiencies, you know, sort of reconfiguring a better process and then applying technology to make it really, really efficient, fast and effective.

Priya Keshav:

You bring up a good point, I always found RFPs to be painful. Most of the time, by the time it's drafted, the real focus of what the need is lost in the process. I end up not knowing what you really want. I mean, I've never had a good experience with an RFP and that probably is true of anybody who's worked on any kind of RFP or responded to an RFP. So, great thoughts.

What role does technology play in building third-party management programs? How have you leveraged technology to solve problems?

Cash Butler:

So, technology is the sort of the third leg of the stool. First, it's people, then it's processing, then it's technology. In today's world, there are always new and interesting things, technological things, advancements. You know things like blockchain, which is technology. It's not cryptocurrencies, some people may think. But there are, you know, as these technological technologies evolve, you can build things that reduce the human interaction, don't remove it, but reduce it to its key needs. You're always going to want to see if there is a technology out there that can enhance a process. That is the great efficiency gain. That's where you really pick up some interesting information and you know, certainly, in today's world with, you know, artificial intelligence and data analytics, you can do some wonderful things. Most often it's a sort of reactive situation, however, and we're working on some stuff now. We're looking at Data not only in the rear-view mirror and that reactionary stuff and understanding what happened, but we're also looking at it proactively to predict we're going to need a vendor that can do this Or we're going to need to understand our vendor, our vendor supply chain and run it through some modeling to identify risks before we implement those supply chains.

Priya Keshav:

So, what are some of the biggest challenges with third-party management? Any tips on how to overcome these challenges?

Cash Butler:

Well, nothing is easy. That said, it can be easier if you have good relationships and you have good process technology. You have a good healthy feedback loop that informs and is not necessarily pejorative, but you know tries suits for improvement to evaluate, you know, how did this project go? How did this vendor perform? How did the customer perform? did they scope the work out properly? Did they ask for the right things? And the review should not just be a customer reviewing a vendor, the vendor should also feel safe to review and help the customer improve. If they scope the work out like this, they may have saved, you know, $100,000 or they may have had a better outcome. That's the kind of feedback that people should welcome. These are opportunities for improvement, not the need to beat people down or to be negative. You know change is constant, and even though more often than not, people and organizations resist change, even though it still trickles in. For instance, when the Internet kicked in, guess what, that accelerated change. Dramatically and all kinds of opportunities popped up, even you know I'm old enough to remember when it became, you know, just started in its embassy. Unfortunately, we've had this pandemic thing and it's awful, terrible, but guess what remote works picked up, lowering costs for travel? You know, even when we go back, the new evolution is, I'm sure, it'll be less travel, more collaborative. Probably reduce real estate costs, so I guess you know, the opportunity comes in. The change also just simplifies things. Any good change just keeps it simple, keeping it simple is reducing complexity, reducing logistics. You know, whatever it may be, keeping your vendor agreements simple, fair-embrace change. It's an opportunity. Keep it simple and collaborate fairly and yeah, and by the way, also implement the tech. So, technology is what you need to do all these things and to keep improving on all these things.

Priya Keshav:

Thank you for sharing your insights with us Cash. I appreciate you being with us today and your great insights! Thank you.

Cash Butler:

Well, thank you, I really enjoyed myself Priya, as always.

*Views and opinions expressed by guests do not necessarily reflect the view of Meru Data.*