From 7 Days to 1 Day: The Practical Integration of Contract Review and Management by ALA Hotel Group

How many大大小小 contracts does a company process annually? The answer from Yali Digital Tech Group, a large hotel chain corporation, is – nearly 10,000. With traditional methods, how many processes would these contracts generate for approval and stamping? – more than 20,000. Previously, a single contract would take up to seven days to complete the approval and stamping and then be archived; however, now it only takes one day. How did they do it? Let’s uncover the efficiency puzzle behind Yali Digital Tech Group. Yali Digital Tech Group ranks 39th among global hotel groups and 14th among Chinese hotel groups. Among its sub-brands, the "Yaste Hotel" ranks sixth among mid-range Chinese hotel brands. The group owns four major brands: Yaste Hotel, Yasfei Hotel, Yaste International Hotel, and Yameitu Hotel. Currently, more than 1,000 of its hotels have opened or are under construction, covering more than 200 important cities. The staff count is over 13,000 employees, and globally it has more than 25 million registered members.

How many大大小小 contracts does one company annually process? The answer from the large hotel chain group, Yali Digital Tech, is — nearly ten thousand.

Under traditional handling methods, how many processes did those contracts generate for approval and stamping? — over 20,000.

How would it be possible, that from initiation to stamping and filing, the process of a contract, once required as long as seven days, now takes just one day?

Let's take a look at Yali Digital Tech's efficiency secret.

Yali Digital Tech Group ranks globally 39th among major hotel groups and 14th inside China. Its sub-brand "Yaster Hotel" is among the top six mid-range hotel brands in China. The group operates four brands: "Yaster Hotel," "Yas菲尔 Hotel," "Yaster International Hotel," and "Ya Meitu Hotel." Currently, over 1,000 of its branded hotels are either already operational or under construction and are spread across more than 200 key cities, with a workforce exceeding 13,000 employees, providing a global membership base of over 25 million people.

Cross-system contract approval and multiple processes:

Employees "waiting with frustration" and executives "burdened with approvals."

Fang Tang is the technology director at Yali Digital Tech Group. She and her team are responsible for managing and maintaining internal digital office platforms and promoting new technologies and tools within Yali Digital Tech.

Since Yali Digital Tech began using DingTalk throughout the organization in 2019, Fang Tang's team gradually found that internal communication and collaboration had become smoother. However, on the operational level, multiple platform usage coexisted, restricting further efficiency improvements. Especially in contract management, pain points such as repetitive approvals and difficult document retrieval after archiving urgently needed resolution.

As a large chain hotel group, Yali Digital Tech processes an average of close to ten thousand contracts annually, covering franchise operations, renovation, various purchases, human resources, and more. From submitting a contract for approval, stamping, and archiving, three processes—contract approval, stamping approval, archival—were necessary, involving multiple approval nodes.

Take the processing procedure for a purchase contract as an example. Once the OA contract approval in DingTalk is completed, direct stamping cannot be conducted. Instead, applicants must initiate another process in the electronic signature system. Hence, this entire contract process, on average, takes three to four days, at times even exceeding seven days. "Certain business contracts are reviewed once by company leaders on one platform and then possibly again in the stamp approval platform. This significantly increases workload and sometimes affects the business progress," Fang stated.

For contract archiving, previous systems could only organize contracts by set criteria, such as the corresponding party, department, and time, but lacked other dimensions like the signatory, agreement value, date, document category, and affiliated project. Consequently, the management was unable to analyze the contracts and thus gauge the corporate developments of the group, business units, and branch offices.

One-day unified approval and signature

No more back-to-back approvals for contracts and document stamps

With the help of DingTalk and its partner, eSign, Yali Digital Tech Group enabled "DingTalk Smart Contracts" at hotels in 2024. They integrated over ten types of approval processes for diverse contracts and related document stamping spread across other approval platforms, achieving unified process management for OA contract approval, document stamping, and archiving.

Now, when employees submit a contract approval process on DingTalk, they can fill out the contract details by contract type. The approval nodes then automatically proceed, and once it is approved, they can jump to the electronic signature system autonomously, completing the signing and stamped procedures, without having to start another process or wait for leaders to approve the document stamping. "Leaders won't be incessantly urged to approve contracts and then approve stamps," Fang noted.

"With this system, the contract stamping process, which previously required several days, has been reduced to the fastest time of less than one day. The significant reduction in leaders' approval workload has also contributed to the improved efficiency of the corresponding business teams," said Fang. With this system, Yali Digital Tech has also centralized all contract approvals and document stamping for the group headquarters and direct stores onto a unified platform, which benefits decision-makers to promptly grasp contract information.

Contract retrieval becomes smooth

Managing decisions backed by data

At the contract archiving stage, intelligent contract systems provide support for over 40 customizable fields, creating a foundation for contract retrieval and refined analysis. Historical contracts now have the potential to transform into "data gold mines."

Yali Digital Tech team members can later tally more detailed aspects of contracts, including validity periods, total contract value, associated projects, signature status, etc., achieving precise statistics and multidimensional data analyses of contracts. This helps leadership accurately grasp business states for efficient decision-making, maximizing the business value of contract data.

About Smart Contracts on DingTalk

Smart Contracts on DingTalk is a deep collaboration between DingTalk and eSign, designed to create a one-stop business-financial legal management platform for small and medium enterprises. It covers the contract life cycle management capabilities of "writing-approving-signing-repository", and specifically includes features such as "writing–creating contract clause templates, reviewing–contract review and intelligent document difference comparison, signing–contract signing and e-stamping, management–custom contract numbering management, contract ledger maintenance, expiration reminders, counterparty management, contract data analysis", and other key product capabilities.

Across China, many well-known enterprises in industries such as retail, hotels, consumer goods, and manufacturing have selected Smart Contracts on DingTalk to further realize digital advancement in operational management.

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