Brightflag, with offices in New York, Ireland, and Australia, offers their flagship legal billing application, emphasizing spend management and advanced analytics.
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Mitratech TAP Workflow Automation
Score 7.5 out of 10
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TAP Workflow Automation is a business process automation solution, enabling clients to digitize any workflow. The solution aims to improve efficiency, productivity, standardization, and compliance, as well as drive cost savings and time-to-value. TAP's drag-and-drop UI lets users build and deploy workflows without coding or IT involvement. TAP's open API enables clients to integrate into existing tools to drive automation across the organization.
I already recommend Brightflag to anyone and everyone who processes invoices. There is a lot of information and data that comes on these invoices, and having a system that streamlines the information in one place has been extremely useful for a department that is a cost center and needs a quick way to justify every spend.
I think TAP is well suited for legal operations teams and processes that have been undergone lean process improvement. Moments when we have run into trouble with the tool has stemmed from our own internal struggle with how we want to run our processes. This is not the fault of the tool, but our failure to properly vet the process beforehand. As we begin to automate more processes, we have the ability to properly lean them out beforehand to make them more efficient. If you have a process that is inefficient, do not try to overcome it with automation. This tool is well suited for scenarios in which you require upfront data capture, routing, approvals and/or e-signature. It is also great for centralizing your data.
Super easy to set up and use. The interface is intuitive, but it's worth spending some time getting used to seeing where the different "file cabinets" are located. I recommend having one person dedicated to the day-to-day management of the platform (separate from the reviewers and approvers), someone who just manages to upload the invoices, setting up new vendors, liaising with BF Support, but cross-training everyone who uses it on the broad functions.
Customer support is spectacular. Probably the single best quality of this product. They are quick to respond, quick to troubleshoot, and quick to offer suggestions on workarounds for things that might still be in the works (or unique to us). That level of agility and can-do attitude is what I needed in a partner like this.
I was not part of the evaluation/purchasing process for ThinkSmart. I can say it's a very unique tool in what it provides and has much potential to become very robust. I'm very excited to provide feedback/suggestions so both ThinkSmart & our company can grow together! At my previous company, we used Hiperos as a vendor risk management tool and it was very clunky and difficult to use/maintain from both an admin & end user perspective.
ROI has been superb: saw a 30% drop in legal spend (based on invoice amount) due to catching items that shouldn't have been charged or charges that exceeded agreed-upon caps.
Being able to add prior years' invoices to the system has been incredible since it allows for internal benchmarking and YoY comparison reporting.
The tool hasn't rolled out yet so we cannot speculate the positive/negative impacts quite yet. However, I know it'll free up a lot of time for risk subject matter experts to gather vendor risk data for critical/high-risk vendors. From a negative standpoint, it may significantly delay the procurement process for purchases if due diligence is triggered and/or there's pushback from vendors.
