Why a Leading HVAC Manufacturer Chose Leah for Enterprise Contract Management After Legacy System Failure

A leading HVAC manufacturer, a major HVAC and comfort solutions manufacturer operating across the United States and Mexico, faced a contract management crisis. After attempting to migrate 35,000 contract records from their 30-year-old IBM mainframe system, the organization was forced to abandon the effort entirely. Despite months of remediation work, the data quality issues proved irredeemable—corrupted records, incomplete information, and unclean data made continued cleanup futile.

Beyond the failed migration, a leading HVAC manufacturer's legal and contracts teams faced an operational bottleneck that threatened their ability to scale. Managing contracts for their Motili subsidiary—a platform business with 1,700 active contractors and 2,500 customer accounts—plus 1,487 suppliers across their manufacturing operations required manual data entry for every single agreement. Information had to be entered separately into both operational platforms (Coupa for procurement, Motili's proprietary AWS system for contractor management) and their contract repository, creating redundant work and duplication risk.

The vendor master system's character limitations forced abbreviated company names, requiring additional manual verification steps to ensure legal contracts contained proper legal entity names. Procurement teams lacked visibility into which vendors had executed legal agreements, forcing manual cross-checking between systems. With an active project to roll out updated contractor agreements across their entire 1,700-contractor network, the manual approach was completely untenable.

A leading HVAC manufacturer needed an enterprise-grade contract lifecycle management platform that could serve as a single source of truth across multiple subsidiaries and business systems. The solution had to support sophisticated workflow automation for high-volume contract execution—far beyond what their existing systems could provide.

Coupa, their procure-to-pay platform, offered basic contract storage capabilities, but the team quickly recognized these were insufficient for legal contract management requiring negotiation, redlining, and full lifecycle capabilities. They needed a purpose-built CLM solution designed for complex legal workflows, not just document storage.

The ideal solution needed robust API integration capabilities to connect with multiple enterprise systems—enabling vendor data to flow automatically from Coupa, contractor information to synchronize with the Motili platform, and contract status to trigger downstream business processes. The organization required bidirectional data flow where operational data could auto-populate agreements, while contract execution could trigger operational enablement for contractor dispatch eligibility.

Data quality and standardization were critical. After the painful legacy migration failure, the company wanted to establish clean processes from the beginning rather than perpetuate historical data problems. The solution needed to support rapid contract form development, enabling their legal team to create standardized templates across multiple contract types: NDAs, Master Service Agreements, Confidential Supply Chain Agreements, Long Term Supply Agreements, and various procurement-specific agreements.

With operations spanning multiple legal entities (DNA, DA A, and Motili) across US and Mexico regions, enterprise governance capabilities and multi-subsidiary rollout support were essential requirements.