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"If it works at SAP, it can work anywhere. With Checkbox, we replaced complexity with clarity - automating approvals, enforcing compliance, and saving time every day."
The Challenge and Solution
SAP's Legal Operations team had adopted a widely used enterprise workflow platform for managing legal spend requests, enabling in-house attorneys to request budgets and approve law firm selections. Their workflow development objectives were to:
- Provide a reliable user experience
- Ensure compliance with corporate procurement policies
- Build a flexible workflow that adapts to evolving policies and business rules
- Easily integrate legal technology solutions
However, limitations with SAP Legal’s existing workflow solution soon became apparent. The system lacked real-time request tracking, required frequent manual interventions, and could not fully automate approval workflows.
To address these challenges, SAP Legal Operations transitioned to Checkbox—a more advanced workflow automation solution. This change optimized the approval process from start to finish, offering end-users transparency regarding who is managing their requests.
Connecting Checkbox to Brightflag and PERSUIT
SAP implemented Brightflag for eBilling and PERSUIT for its outside counsel engagement and procurement capabilities. Each system plays a critical role in SAP’s Spend Management program.
- Brightflag acts as SAP's system of record for outside counsel matters. It manages external legal matters and handles eBilling, ensuring compliance with billing guidelines.
- PERSUIT enhances SAP’s procurement process, allowing for competitive RFPs, structured law firm selection process, and cost control through features like reverse auctions and alternative fee arrangements.
While both platforms delivered significant value, they operated in silos—creating inefficiencies and redundant data entry. To unify these workflows and simplify the user experience, SAP introduced Checkbox as the connective layer across systems.
Checkbox now serves as SAP Legal’s spend management workflow, streamlining legal budget requests from initiation to approval. It gathers requestor information, applies decision-tree logic, and automates approval workflows to integrate Brightflag and PERSUIT.
Key Business Outcomes
Why SAP selected Checkbox
SAP evaluated multiple workflow automation tools but selected Checkbox for its:
- Flexibility – Customizable workflows tailored to SAP’s needs
- User-Friendly Interface – Step-by-step guidance eliminates training requirements
- No-Code Functionality – A visual workflow designer enables the legal team to easily customize, modify, and scale workflows without the need for coding
- Advanced decision-tree logic to automate complex approval workflows
- Dynamic approval routing integrated with Active Directory
- JavaScript Blocks for advanced business logic customization
SAP’s Onboarding & Implementation Experience
SAP’s transition to Checkbox was seamless, thanks to hands-on implementation, training, and support from the Checkbox team. As a no-code platform, Checkbox empowered SAP’s legal team to independently build, modify, and manage workflows without IT support. The Checkbox team’s responsiveness, combined with SAP’s internal expertise, ensured a smooth deployment that was well-received by stakeholders.
What This Means for Your Legal Team
SAP’s success with Checkbox demonstrates how agile, customer-focused technology can effectively support even the most complex enterprises. If your legal team faces slow approvals, compliance challenges, or manual processes, Checkbox provides a proven solution to streamline operations.
With Checkbox, legal teams can:
- Streamline legal intake of service requests from the business
- Automate compliance within workflows, ensuring policy adherence
- Integrate disparate systems, reducing manual work and duplicate data entry
- Scale automation across multiple legal processes—without IT dependency
By eliminating inefficiencies and enhancing workflow automation, Checkbox empowers legal teams to operate more efficiently, compliantly, and with greater agility.
Ready to see how Checkbox can transform your legal workflows?