Contracting suppliers with speed and legal security
When we bought that autonomy for ourselves, we became a problem solver inside the company.”
About Andrade Gutierrez
Andrade Gutierrez is a reference in the construction sector, with more than 74 years of activity and a focus on quality and innovation. To sustain that standard, the legal and procurement teams joined forces around a common goal: making the whole supplier contracting process more efficient.
On a construction site, deadlines are not an abstraction. An urgent need on site will not wait for a round of contract review — but neither does it justify giving up the risk allocation the company has standardized. The project was born of that tension, with Júlia Cândido, Risk and Contract Administration Manager, Joanna Pinheiro, Procurement Coordinator, and Niédja Rosendo, analyst.
Key points
- 88% of contracts are signed under the AG standard
- Only 12% of contracts require any intervention from legal
- The supplier contracting chain digitized end to end in procurement
- Complete, automatic recording of all communications and approvals
Speed on site without giving up the AG Standard
There was no way to speed up contracting without harming legal security. Templates were complex and inflexible, which did not help the internal client: whoever needed to contract found a document that was hard to use and went back to legal.
Manual operation created bottlenecks in series, from the difficulty of locating documents to the time lost drafting and reviewing files page by page. And on the management side, there was no way to track which risks had been authorized on projects under execution.
- They could not speed up contracting without harming legal security;
- Complex, inflexible templates that did not help the internal client;
- Bottlenecks in manual operations, such as difficulty locating documents;
- Time lost drafting and reviewing files page by page;
- Difficulty tracking authorized risks on projects under execution.
How netLex helped Andrade Gutierrez
Andrade Gutierrez used netLex to digitize the entire contracting chain run by procurement. The stated goal was twofold: increase the speed of the business teams while maintaining the “AG Standard” of governance and risk allocation in supplier relationships.
- Autonomy to adapt the platform and solve problems inside the company itself.
- Visibility into indicators, for intelligence and department management.
- Legal focused on strategic demands, bringing more value to the business.
- Security and speed for procurement to handle urgent needs on site.
- Complete, automatic recording of all communications and approvals.
Efficiency that translates into numbers
- 88% of contracts are signed under the AG standard.
- Only 12% of contracts require any intervention from legal.
The two figures are the same data read from two sides. Eighty-eight percent of contracts come out within the standard the company defined, which means procurement handles urgent site needs without having to call legal. The remaining 12% is what is left for analysis, and that is exactly where having a lawyer makes a difference.
The gain the superintendent herself highlights is not about deadlines, it is about position: with the autonomy to adapt the platform, the area came to be seen as a problem solver inside the company. The automatic record of communications and approvals is what sustains that, the speed did not come from skipping a step, it came from making the step traceable.
Conclusion
The Andrade Gutierrez case answers a common objection in regulated sectors: standardizing does not stiffen, it frees. When the standard is embedded in the template and in the flow, the site moves on its own in most cases — and legal shows up where the risk is real.
