A Leading HVAC Manufacturer Achieves 78% Efficiency Gain and Unlocks $18M+ in Revenue Protection with Leah
A leading HVAC manufacturer, a global HVAC and comfort technology manufacturer with $10.5 billion in annual revenue, faced a critical inflection point in contract management maturity. Operating across multiple business entities including a leading HVAC manufacturer North America (DNA), the company Applied (DAA), and Mexico operations (DMX), the organization struggled with severe fragmentation across contract systems and processes. Different business units operated completely independently—some used legacy CLM platforms, others relied on procurement systems, and many teams depended entirely on Excel spreadsheets, SharePoint repositories, and email-based manual approvals.
Contract records scattered across fragmented systems requiring enterprise consolidation
Enterprise-wide visibility into contract obligations across distributed business units
International operations waiting for multilingual CLM capabilities
“Our issue is bandwidth. There's too much work getting to the legal team, and we don't have the resources to handle routine tasks that should be delegated to business users.”
Legal Operations Lead, A Leading HVAC Manufacturer
Challenge
A leading HVAC manufacturer, a global HVAC and comfort technology manufacturer with $10.5 billion in annual revenue, faced a critical inflection point in contract management maturity. Operating across multiple business entities including a leading HVAC manufacturer North America (DNA), the company Applied (DAA), and Mexico operations (DMX), the organization struggled with severe fragmentation across contract systems and processes. Different business units operated completely independently—some used legacy CLM platforms, others relied on procurement systems, and many teams depended entirely on Excel spreadsheets, SharePoint repositories, and email-based manual approvals.
This patchwork created operational chaos. The legal operations team faced crushing bandwidth constraints supporting enterprise-wide contract needs across distributed business units with no single source of truth. When leadership urgently needed to review specific terms across twenty historical contracts for a business change initiative, the system capabilities simply couldn't support it. The team had to decline the request entirely—the cross-contract analysis was beyond their capacity.
NDA processing consumed approximately 45 minutes per transaction through manual processes, with expensive attorney time spent on mechanical redlining tasks rather than substantive legal risk assessment. Ad hoc contract search requests constantly interrupted the core team's workflow, preventing focus on higher-value strategic work. The DMX Mexico team had requested CLM access for over 18 months before receiving attention, highlighting significant unmet operational demand in international regions due to lack of multilingual support.
Beyond operational inefficiency, revenue leakage emerged as a major strategic concern. The company struggled to capture price escalation opportunities embedded in recurring distributor contracts—which represent approximately 30% of their $10.5 billion revenue—leaving substantial money on the table when pre-negotiated price increases weren't systematically tracked and executed. Rebate overpayment represented another challenge, with an estimated 2% leakage rate across rebate programs due to inability to effectively compare rebate contract terms against live sales data at scale. Warranty obligation management lacked visibility, preventing timely release of held-back funds when contractual warranty periods expired.
Solution Search
A leading HVAC manufacturer selected Leah’s enterprise CLM platform for its comprehensive contract lifecycle management capabilities and flexibility to support complex, multi-business-unit organizational structures. The platform's core capabilities addressed the fragmentation challenge through a unified system of record providing enterprise-wide contract visibility, standardized workflows replacing inconsistent manual processes, and centralized repository eliminating scattered Excel and SharePoint tracking.
The solution's intelligent automation features proved critical for bandwidth relief: automated approval routing with sequential departmental workflows, AI-powered extraction of effective dates and contract metadata, self-service contract execution capabilities diverting routine work from legal resources, and version management with collaboration tools enabling cross-functional coordination. Template management functionality consolidated seven different NDA variations under unified application types, while sophisticated taxonomy architecture compressed over 50 original fragmented contract types into 15 structured categories.
For strategic revenue protection, Leah’s upgrade delivered transformative contract intelligence capabilities. One-drop contract ingestion eliminated manual intake form completion through automatic extraction, while unlimited dynamic extraction analyzed all terms across entire contracts without pre-configuration requirements. Contract-level chatbots enabled users to query specific agreements directly, and cross-contract reporting capabilities allowed portfolio-wide analysis for terms like price escalations, rebate structures, warranty periods, or unusual provisions. Rules written in natural language rather than traditional AI training made the system accessible to business users without technical expertise.
The platform's multilingual capabilities—supporting Spanish, Portuguese, and future Japanese requirements—finally enabled international expansion that had been blocked for 18+ months. Integration architecture supported connections with a leading HVAC manufacturer's enterprise ecosystem including Coupa for procurement automation, Salesforce for global deployment, and DocuSign for signature workflows.
“We're now tracking not just time savings but how many contracts are diverted from legal to other areas. This visibility gives us much more power in demonstrating value to stakeholders and building data-driven cases for resources.”
Legal Operations Lead, A Leading HVAC Manufacturer
Implementation
A leading HVAC manufacturer approached deployment with a carefully structured multi-phase methodology demonstrating mature change management rather than attempting big-bang migration. Implementation began in October 2022 at the DNA business unit, establishing legal and procurement teams as primary users from day one to ensure cross-functional adoption.
Phase 1 focused on confidentiality and non-disclosure agreements, consolidating seven different document variations under a single unified application type. This phase established foundational workflows, user roles, templates, and basic search capabilities while proving the platform's value with a focused use case. The organization worked through early testing with initial data loads as teams learned the platform, building expertise incrementally.
Phase 2, completed in August 2024, tackled service agreements including company service contract agreements, Master Service Agreements, and IT statements of work. The organization partnered with specialized consultants to rationalize their contract taxonomy, undertaking a major consolidation effort that compressed from over 50 original fragmented contract types down to approximately 15 grouped application types with multiple templates underneath each logical category. Equipment Purchase Agreements also went live during this phase, and the company configured 25 key legal obligations—exceeding standard offerings to meet their sophisticated compliance and risk management requirements.
Establishing proper governance proved essential. An executive steering committee was formalized with biweekly oversight meetings, creating a neutral forum for addressing implementation challenges and ensuring executive visibility separate from tactical configuration work. This governance structure enabled rapid issue escalation and resource allocation decisions as the deployment scaled.
Phase 3, launched in early 2025, includes the Leah platform upgrade—a $55,000 investment expanding the total annual subscription from $108,000 to $163,000. This phase encompasses six additional contract types, migration of 265 legacy procurement contracts, automated redlining playbook configuration, and the critical Mexico DMX expansion enabled by Spanish language capabilities. The 12-16 week implementation timeline includes comprehensive configuration, data migration with quality validation, workflow design, and specialized training sessions for attorneys, procurement teams, and business users on AI search and analysis capabilities.
Single sign-on integration via Okta was implemented in Q1 2025, with future Phase 4 roadmap including Coupa integration for end-to-end contract-to-pay automation and continued expansion of AI capabilities for specialized use cases like continuous contract monitoring.
Outcome
A leading HVAC manufacturer has achieved substantial, quantifiable transformation across operational efficiency and strategic value dimensions. NDA processing time dropped from 45 minutes to approximately 10 minutes post-implementation, representing a 78% efficiency gain that freed expensive attorney time for strategic work rather than routine administrative tasks. Signature volumes increased dramatically from 205 to 384 comparing year-over-year periods, demonstrating strong adoption momentum and workflow integration as the platform became embedded in daily operations across 108+ users.
The legal operations team now diverts routine contracts away from expensive legal resources to self-service business user channels, fundamentally shifting the operating model. Attorneys focus on substantive risk assessment rather than mechanical jurisdiction changes and formatting tasks. The platform enabled enterprise-wide contract process metrics for the first time, creating leadership visibility into contract operations that previously did not exist despite sophisticated tracking for other areas like litigation spend management.
The Chief Legal Officer mandated enterprise CLM consolidation based on DNA's three-year success, directing the DAA division to standardize on Leah rather than proceeding with a competitive RFP already underway. This executive validation demonstrates the platform's strategic value and positions it as the enterprise standard across all business units.
Strategic revenue protection capabilities are now operational with transformative financial impact projections. AI-powered price escalation monitoring in recurring distributor contracts—representing approximately 30% of total revenue—projects over $10 million in revenue capture opportunity using conservative assumptions. By continuously scanning contracts to identify opportunities to enforce pre-negotiated price increases with distributors, the system addresses a critical pain point where escalation clauses weren't systematically tracked and executed.
Rebate leakage reduction through automated comparison of rebate contracts against live sales data targets $8 million in first-year savings by reducing the known 2% overpayment problem by 25%. This capability transforms contract terms from static documents into actionable intelligence driving financial performance. Warranty obligation visibility now provides the ability to release held-back funds when contractual periods expire, reducing tied-up capital and accelerating cash flow.
"Leadership cares about monetary impact and revenue growth, not just time savings for legal teams. Being able to quantify over $18 million in combined revenue capture and cost savings makes the business case undeniable."
— Legal Operations Lead, the company
The Mexico DMX operations that waited 18+ months for CLM access are now receiving deployment, unlocking international contract management capabilities that were previously impossible. Cross-functional collaboration has matured significantly, with procurement teams across DNA and DAA strongly engaged with the platform and embedded workflows spanning legal, procurement, IT security, and business stakeholders operating seamlessly.
The transformation from fragmented systems and manual processes to an enterprise-standard intelligent contract platform positions the company for continued scaling. Future M&A due diligence processes will benefit from rapid cross-contract analysis capabilities, and the foundation is established for continuous contract monitoring agents that will further automate compliance and opportunity identification across their portfolio.
