TD SYNNEX, formerly Tech Data and SYNNEX, is one of the world’s largest IT distributors with over 20,000 employees globally. We speak with Arjen Schuiling, Senior Manager, Global Legal and Compliance Operations on why they use BRYTER and the impact on legal operations.
Making company guides and policies accessible
“As a legal department, we have a lot of information that we need to disseminate across the business to manage legal and regulatory risk. We have over 50 company guides and policies, from gift acceptance policies to IT and travel,” explains Arjen.
However, while thousands of hours are invested in drafting and updating these policies, for them to be effective in managing and mitigating risk, they need to be accessible and usable.
“Before we used BRYTER, for our commercial colleagues to access company guides and policies they had to spend significant amounts of time trying to identify the correct policy from our intranet, and then interpret it to their particular situation. If they couldn’t identify the correct answer, they would then need to email the Ethics and Compliance team and wait for an answer before proceeding with the desired action. The old process involved spending hours of time navigating policies or waiting for answers. The result is slower business decisions, increased risk of non-compliance, and hours of time wasted on recurring questions and answers. It is simply not enough for policies to exist – they must be accessible and easily actionable. This is where BRYTER helps.”
Arjen Schuiling is Senior Manager, Global Legal and Compliance Operations at TD SYNNEX, a global distributor of technology products, services, and solutions.
How TD SYNNEX uses BRYTER
It is simply not enough for policies to exist – they must be accessible and easily actionable. This is where BRYTER helps.
Arjen Schuiling, Senior Manager, Global Legal and Compliance Operations, TD SYNNEX
Arjen and the legal operations team at TD SYNNEX use the BRYTER no-code platform to make information accessible, and automate standardized, recurring tasks and contract creation. “Using BRYTER, we turn static company policies into accessible, user-friendly applications. Now, we can guide our colleagues directly to the information they need through a series of simple questions, and they are pointed directly to the correct policy and answer to their query.”
Arjen explains further, “For example, if someone received a gift from a supplier, instead of finding the Gift Acceptance Policy, reading it, interpreting it, and possibly still emailing the Ethics and Compliance team with the question, they simply ask “Can I accept this gift?” This triggers a series of questions based on decision logic, for example, “How much is the gift? Who is it from?” The result: a more easily accessible, usable company policy, saving hours of time and making compliance easier.
TD SYNNEX plans not just to use BRYTER’s no-code app builder to make knowledge more accessible, but also to automate standardized and recurring tasks. Arjen shared an example of such templated work that he could automate with BRYTER: non-disclosure agreements (NDAs).
NDAs are one of the most frequently entered into agreements, and necessary to commence new business relationships. However, drafting, amending, and finalizing an NDA is a time-consuming process. Arjen explained how he could change this. “With the BRYTER NDA Generator we can create a fully automated solution that generates NDAs, with no touch from legal. Using the handover function, our commercial colleagues can even automate sending the NDA out externally to vendors and third parties, and the BRYTER application integrates with DocuSign for e-signature for a true no-touch, self-service, end-to-end application.”
“A real time saver for the legal team”
With ever-increasing workloads and pressures on the legal team, and a relatively stagnant headcount and budget, legal operation managers like Arjen need to find ways to improve operational efficiency, save time, and better deploy the valuable advice of the legal team. And herein lies the real value of BRYTER for TD SYNNEX.
The time savings is huge – once you automate a workflow with BRYTER it just runs by itself with no need for further intervention from the legal team. The ROI on using BRYTER is enormous. Using BRYTER we saved 95% of time previously spent on manual work. Now, the entire decisioning workflow and document automation is automated end-to-end. BRYTER is a real time saver for the legal team.
Arjen Schuiling, Senior Manager, Global Legal and Compliance Operations, TD SYNNEX
With these time savings, the TD SYNNEX legal team is better able to focus on high value work. Arjen explains, “At TD SYNNEX we are 200+ people in the legal team globally. I have yet to meet a legal team in my career that is not overloaded with work: there is just so much to do. And when you’ve invested so much time in getting a law degree, completing your training and developing your career, you do not then want to spend most of your days doing templated contractual work like amending NDAs.”
“Every time something is automated, this represents an opportunity for the legal team to spend their time doing the work they are actually trained for: work that provides real strategic value like negotiating contracts and assessing risk. This complex, strategic work cannot be automated, and is also the work that lawyers find most fulfilling. No one wants to spend their whole day rubber stamping documents.”
By automating recurring, manual work, BRYTER helps free up the legal team to have more time for more meaningful relationships with the business.
Arjen Schuiling, Senior Manager, Global Legal and Compliance Operations, TD SYNNEX
Improving service delivery
By reducing the time spent on manual, routine legal tasks, Arjen did not just save the legal team’s time, but also his clients’ time. “The legal team is a service department within our organization. We need to facilitate commercial activities and serve the company. Every progress we can make in terms of time saved, and process improvements, represents improved service levels.”
“Some legal teams get a really bad reputation within the commercial business for being ‘showstoppers’ – those people who slow things down and prevent revenue generating activity. At best, this is a perception issue, but at worst, it is reality. In any event, using BRYTER flips this entirely on its head. Whereas it can 4 or 5 working days to get an NDA signed, with BRYTER we could reduce this to 5 minutes.”
ROI is more than time saved: It’s improved accuracy and risk management
For Arjen and the legal operations team at TD SYNNEX, ROI is not just about time saved, but also about improved accuracy and a better management of risk.
“Using BRYTER, we can achieve positive ROI in terms of time saved and improved accuracy. For example, elements of NDAs can be prone to human error, like inputting the incorrect vendor entity. With BRYTER, and the handover functionality, we could actually hand this part of drafting the NDA over to the relevant entity to complete. By enabling the counterparty to provide the information needed for the completed agreement, we could reduce the risk of inaccurate information and save all that time which was previously spent in back-and-forth correspondence and document updates” explains Arjen.
With regards to risk management, as TD SYNNEX is a publicly listed company and continues to voluntarily comply with these requirements, it is subject to numerous, stringent rules regarding company processes, policies, and disclosures. As Arjen explained, “Everything needs to be documented, and this is one of the great things about BRYTER’s service automation platform. By using your document automation functionality and integrating to databases, we can easily track everything, like third party agreements to our policies.”
Building with BRYTER is “easy peasy”
One of the less obvious benefits of BRYTER is how it provides the time and space for the legal team to focus on true process improvements. As Arjen explained, “To automate decisions and workflows with BRYTER, you first need to understand and visualize your processes. BRYTER facilitates this with its visual, drag-and-drop editor. We found that in modelling and visualizing these processes with BRYTER it prompted us to ask the questions like ‘Is this the best way to do this? Can we improve it?’ So not only is BRYTER the solution for the final product, but the process of building in BRYTER helped us optimize our processes.”
And what about the actual building? Is it as intuitive to use as BRYTER claims? “Building with BRYTER is easy peasy,” explains Arjen. “I am not that good with technical tools, but even I can see the logic. Because it is all visual, it is very clear to see what is happening. But what is really powerful is how BRYTER combines it all: a decision tree, plus natural language processing, plus workflow automation. I’ve never seen another product that can offer everything BRYTER does, in such an easy-to-use way.”
If you are looking to build without development skills utilising an easy-to-use, “drag-and-drop” editor, book a demo to learn how BRYTER can help your business to automate complex decisioning and recurring requests.
Editor’s note: This story was originally written about Tech Data, which has since merged with SYNNEX to form TD SYNNEX. The story has been updated to reflect this change.