7 Days to 1 Day: A Practical Case Study on Integrated Contract Review and Approval Management at Yali Digital Technology, a Large Hotel Chain Group

A company handles how many large and small contracts every year? The answer from the large hotel chain group Yali Digital Technology is—nearly 10,000.

Under the previous processing method, how many processes were generated for the approval and stamping of these contracts?—More than 20,000.

From contract initiation to stamping and filing, the process used to take up to 7 days; now it only takes 1 day. How did they achieve this?

Let’s take a look at Yali Digital Technology’s efficiency secret.

Yali Digital Technology Group ranks among the top 39 global hotel groups and the top 14 in China. Its “Yast Hotel” brand ranks among the top 6 mid-range hotel brands in China. The group owns four major brands: Yast Hotel, Yastfeel Hotel, Yast International Hotel, and Yameitu Hotel. Currently, the group’s brands have more than 1,000 hotels either open or under development, covering over 200 key cities, with a workforce of over 13,000 employees and more than 25 million members worldwide.

Contract review and approval span multiple systems, involving numerous processes:

Business teams “wait endlessly,” leaders “are bogged down with approvals”

Fangtang is the technical director at Yali Digital Technology Group. She and her team are responsible for managing and maintaining Yali Digital’s internal digital office platform, as well as promoting and implementing new technologies and tools.

In 2019, after Yali Digital’s entire staff began using DingTalk, Fangtang’s team gradually realized that internal communication and collaboration had become smoother. However, at the operational level, multiple platforms still ran in parallel, limiting further efficiency gains. In particular, pain points such as redundant approvals and difficulties in retrieving and filing contracts later on urgently needed to be addressed.

As a large hotel chain group, Yali Digital Technology handles an average of nearly 10,000 contracts each year. These contracts cover franchise agreements, renovations, various procurement deals, HR matters, and more. From contract submission to stamping and filing, the process involves three stages: contract approval, seal approval, and filing, with multiple approval nodes along the way.

Take the processing of a procurement contract as an example: After the contract approval is completed in DingTalk OA, the seal cannot be applied directly. The applicant must submit another separate process in the e-signature system. On average, the entire contract process takes 3–4 days, and can even exceed 7 days. “For some business contracts, company leaders may have already reviewed the contract once in one platform, but then have to review it again in the seal-approval platform, which adds a lot of extra work and sometimes affects business progress,” says Fangtang.

In the contract-filing stage, because the previous system could only categorize contracts using fixed fields such as the counterparty entity, department, and time, dimensions like signatory, amount, date, document type, and project affiliation were missing. As a result, management’s desire to analyze contracts to understand the business performance of the group, business segments, and branch companies was left unfulfilled.

Approval and sealing completed in just 1 day

No more back-and-forth between contract approval and seal approval

With the help of DingTalk and its partner eSign宝, Yali Digital Technology Group launched DingTalk Smart Contracts in 2024. This integrated more than a dozen different contract approval and seal-related processes that had previously been scattered across other approval platforms, enabling unified, streamlined management from contract OA approval through sealing and filing.

Employees simply submit a contract approval process on DingTalk, fill in information across various dimensions based on the contract type, and approval nodes flow automatically. Once approved, the process automatically transitions to the e-signature system, where signing and stamping are completed independently, without the need to submit an additional process or wait for leaders to approve the seal. “Leaders no longer get constantly pestered to approve contracts and then seals,” she says.