Contract Life-cycle Bottlenecks & How to Curb Them: Part II
In our previous blog on Contract Lifecycle Bottlenecks & How to Curb Them: Part I, we discussed the challenges that can drown an organization’s contract process.
We also discussed why contract management needs involvement of various teams apart from legal professionals.
In this final blog post, we will talk about leveraging technology as a means to attain an efficient contract management process.
There are various technology providers who provide comprehensive contract management software applications.
Forrester evaluated 14 most significant vendors on 28 key parameters in its report named The Forrester Wave™: Contract Life-Cycle Management, Q3 2016.
The report shows how each provider measures up and helps decision makers make the right choice from three dimensions: buy-side dominant, sell-side dominant, and all contract life-cycle management.
Below are some of the key benefits of using a contract management software application:
1. Reducing contract authoring cycle time by
- Automating the approval process through pre-defined workflows
- Implementing clause level approvals instead of reviewing the entire contract every time a change is made
- Using e-Signature to automate the signing process to avoid the hassle of scanning and uploading the documents
2. Standardizing contract terms by
- Utilizing pre-approved clauses from the clause library created by legal team in collaboration with different stakeholders to avoid back and forth on the same
- Leveraging the existing templates and updating them regularly to maintain consistency across all similar contracts
3. Increasing contract compliance by
- Enabling stakeholders to collaborate during the contracting process
- Tracking utilization through mapping of AP data to the contract value
- Creating templates very easily and adhering to regulatory norms
With the evolving business environment and increasing communication with suppliers, it has become necessary for organizations to manage contracts effectively.
Manual contract management process has many challenges, as discussed in the earlier blog. To avoid these, organizations can leverage technology and work smarter.
