“Both foundational and transformational, on par with mature contract management tools seen at other companies.”
-The Executive Leadership Team
A custom internal contract management system designed for Cargill’s dynamic IT department, streamlining data centralization for strategic assets (contracts) by integrating and connecting siloed processes across the source-to-pay lifecycle.
I lead the UX Design and Strategy from the first pitch to the MVP and beyond.
Proactive, visibility to our contracts; better leverage
Contracts connected to PO’s, PO’s connected to invoices, paying accurately and on time
Contracts connected to forecasts; reduced surprises and noise in P/L
Facilitated hand-offs and management of contract lifecycle
Currently, Cargill lacks a system to effectively measure or track IT department contracts for strategic assets such as software, hardware, SaaS, and consultants, relying solely on spreadsheets. This results in inefficiencies where contracts may lapse, overpayments occur, and there is limited transparency or oversight.
Using Cargill’s Design System, fast track the development of an MVP that enables users to submit requests to the sourcing team. This system will provide the sourcing team and various finance departments with full visibility into the source-to-pay lifecycle, streamlining the contract writing process.
In addition to fostering complete transparency across siloed departments, the platform will collect key data points to track and manage contracts effectively, establishing metrics and KPIs for ongoing performance monitoring and management, thus, saving the company money.
The timeline for this project was just a few months, with no dedicated product team in place. While the process was technically agile, it operated as a hybrid of agile and waterfall, with limited design review and user-testing. To navigate these constraints, rapid prototyping played a critical role in streamlining handoffs, especially given my limited time with developers. By maintaining a close working relationship with both end-users and the product owner, I was able to design, build, and iterate collaboratively in real-time, ensuring the solution aligned with user needs and project goals.
Close collaboration with the end-user was essential for this project. In this case, the end-user took on the role of an interim business analyst, providing invaluable insights during regular calls.Given the data-heavy nature of the project, with numerous form input fields that evolved daily, this dynamic approach proved highly effective.
Surprisingly, the absence of a dedicated product team became an advantage once momentum was established. Without the constraints of agile principles and ceremonies, we were able to move more quickly, making the lack of traditional structure a blessing in disguise.
For Version 1, our focus was on rapidly bringing the product to market to begin collecting the foundational data needed to build out comprehensive metrics. In Version 2, we plan to introduce a dashboard-style landing page designed to provide the Executive Leadership Team with real-time KPIs and metrics. This will enable them to efficiently oversee and manage contracts across an enterprise of over 160,000 employees.
