We are delighted to present “LEDOX” – An end-to-end contract lifecycle management platform built on Microsoft Office 365

Building on a 350-years’ history of innovation in science, Merck is pioneering new technologies not only in its core business sectors Healthcare, Life Sciences and Performance Materials, but also in enabling its in-house lawyers and business users. The “LEgal DOcument boX” (LEDOX) takes a new approach to contract lifecycle management (CLM), being fully custom-built from Microsoft Office 365 standard components.

“After having evaluated other CLM solutions on the market, we realized that building on our own platform would offer many unique advantages while leveraging our existing Microsoft enterprise licenses and IT infrastructure.”
Nina Stoeckel, Head of Group Legal & Compliance Operations

The CLM component of LEDOX covers the entire contract lifecycle from contract initiation and drafting to negotiation handling with externals, approval and signing workflows for electronic and paper-based signature, due date management, reporting and data retention. Business users are enabled by fully automated contract drafting capabilities for standard agreements while more complex drafting requests are managed by a built-in workflows supporting in-house lawyers involvement. LEDOX uses the full power of MS SharePoint’s collaboration functionalities within the Merck group and offers safe areas of collaboration with third parties. Further legal matter management functionalities that exceed the capabilities of most off-the-shelf CLM solutions are an added benefit gained by custom-building LEDOX.

“Building an application with the scale of LEDOX on a global platform is a game-changing approach and a highly collaborative effort. I was impressed how our internal team has worked with Join and Deloitte and each other, as one team.”
Thomas Sachsendahl, Global Project Manager Information Technology

For designing the underlying business processes, Merck relied on a cross-functional team including Legal Management Consulting experts from Deloitte Legal, process specialists from Deloitte’s Business Process Solution team and change management expertise from Deloitte Consulting. The Deloitte team, based on an evaluation of the existing contract lifecycle management, helped design the to-be contracting processes and meta data model as a blueprint for the technical implementation. Leading up to the go-live, Deloitte supported with user training, change management and communications. Prior to the start of the design work, Deloitte had also delivered a detailed vendor evaluation specific to Merck’s needs.

To achieve a swift implementation, Merck chose Join GmbH for the development and implementation of LEDOX. Join GmbH contributed its technical competence, a deep understanding of business processes and many years of experience in Office 365, SharePoint and document management to the project team. Join not only carried out the technical implementation, but also supported the Merck project team with advice on changes in business processes. The result is an easy-to-use, flexible yet highly secure environment for contracting and other legal matters that Merck will continue to improve and grow over time.

LEDOX is in productive use as of November 2020, serving about 5000 Merck employees in 60 countries, including its in-house lawyers.

Merck core team: Nina Stoeckel and Michael Bergmann, Group Legal & Compliance Operations; Thomas Sachsendahl, Information Technology; Representatives from Legal and Business

Deloitte core team: Klaus Gresbrand, Deloitte Legal; Arne Möller and Yang Yang, Deloitte BPS; Carolin Joseph, Deloitte Consulting

Join core team: Lars Bendler and Christian Wittrich, Management Board; Arnim Wagner, Project Management Lead; Benedikt Finger, Development Lead