Olympia, Washington

The City of Olympia, Washington is the capital city of Washington State and the county seat of Thurston County. The city government employs around 600 people to serve the more than 50,000 residents of Olympia.

Olympia city staff found themselves spending significant time tracking down missing contracts—as many as 60 times a year, for 3-4 hours per search. What’s more, those searches often unknowingly turned up outdated versions of contracts or no contracts at all, exposing them to significant legal risk.

Worst of all, for contracts that did make it into their existing central repository, there was no way to keep tabs on where a document was at in the contract cycle, resulting in missed opportunities to systematically manage contracts.

Based on the recommendation of customers, and with the support of City leadership, a centralized contracts and procurement program was created. The program worked with customers to identify top priorities. A new contract management system was the top focus area identified.

Before they were ready to commit to a new system, Olympia had to be sure that it had all the mandatory elements required by their stakeholders and that departments would actually use the system. They explored over twenty different contract management solutions, and narrowed it down to only three that fit their price range and had the necessary features.

After asking over 15 city staff to participate in demos with these top three solutions and pursuing trials with the final two, the Olympia city staff unanimously chose ContractSafe. The #1 selling point was the ease of use, which alleviated their primary concern of user adoption.

Since implementing ContractSafe, the internal feedback Olympia has received has been extremely positive. They were able to implement ContractSafe the day after purchasing the license, which served them well as the city rapidly transitioned to remote work at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Since then, they have benefited greatly from having all contract records citywide available remotely.

Now, the City of Olympia is operating more efficiently and saving money. Thanks to ContractSafe’s contract management features, Olympia has seen measurable improvements in:

• Lost Time: Staff are spending 75% less time scanning documents, and have completely eliminated tedious contract searches. This results in cost savings of $10,000 per year of staff time within the City Clerk’s office alone—meaning ContractSafe pays for itself with staff time savings alone.
  
  
• Sustainability and Streamlining: With the DocuSign integration, the city has been able to go nearly paperless with its entire contract process, delivering measurable reductions in paper use and carbon emissions and helping the city work toward its sustainability goals. 
  
  
• Departmental Collaboration: They now have 100% visibility into all agreements and their expiration dates citywide, bringing order and efficiency to their contracts.

City employees have quickly learned to love their new contract management solution as well. The average score on their annual internal survey for the Centralized Management and Tracking of Contracts went from below 1 (considered not meeting expectations) to above 4 on a 5 point scale. Employees have noted that “it’s so easy to find contracts now” and even that “ContractSafe is fun to use.”

By letting ContractSafe help them save time and money, keep tabs on expiring contracts, and enable a free flow of information between departments, the City of Olympia is able to save money and more effectively do the work that matters most: providing meaningful service to local citizens.