Improving Management in a Strategically Important Company

The electric power company Istad AS is a strategically important business in the Molde region in northwestern Norway. They provide power production, power trading, grid operations and fiber to residents of four municipalities. Sound contract management is simply part of their purpose.

By distributing electricity, network and fiber, the group today provides important and forward-looking services to around 30,000 customers in both the business and private markets. Istad is an important benefactor of voluntary groups and organizations in the region.

Dyre Halse is Chief Information Officer in Istad’s group headquarters, which provides services to the subsidiaries in the group. The role entails that Halse handles a large number of supplier contracts and deliveries to the two subsidiaries. Together with the CFO, he uncovered the necessity of better financial and routine management of the group's contracts.

"Some NOK 70 million in other operating costs imply a substantial number of contracts. They were previously scattered throughout the group, and we did not have a complete overview. The complexity was both at a departmental and personal level, and the contracts were stored in both inboxes, file servers and physical archives. It is no exaggeration to say that we lacked a holistic approach to contract management," he says.

stad started by adopting a tool for contract management in the group unit, but the need was even greater in the subsidiaries, for example:

"We had a relatively large supplier contract within IT. This was signed by a department manager who later left the company. When he went out the door, we also lost knowledge of the agreement. The new head of department didn't know about the contract - and neither did anyone else. However, the supplier had not forgotten about us, so the invoices kept coming."

"We didn't need more similar incidents to learn from our own mistakes. We had already put House of Control's solution in place for the group function. Now we engaged Karoline Rønsdal in House of Control, who is our Customer Success Manager, for workshops for the entire group, which has around 140 employees. Through the training, people quickly realized that better contract management was needed."

"We now have a very good overview of all the agreements in the entire group. Here we can see who has the daily follow-up of the suppliers. We can sort the agreements by company, department and people. Notification of agreements, such as agreement expiry and renewal, is an important functionality. Let me also add that the new functionality to deal with the Transparency Act is very useful to us."

Istad uses House of Control's solutions not only for supplier agreements, but also for handling contracts with customers. While the private customers are processed in separate systems, the agreements with business customers are handled in Complete Control.

"We quickly started using the solutions from House of Control. Already after the first demo, we were given access to a test database. It was easy to implement the group and company structure in the solution. Day-to-day use is also simple, for example entering important parameters for each agreement: Notifications, owner, duration, notice period, options, contact person at supplier - and so on. This is more than "nice to have"; it is key information when you take over responsibility for supplier and contract management from someone else - especially those who have quit."