Enterprise Contract Management: Top Strategic Reasons to Invest

For businesses that need to sign and manage hundreds of contracts, there’s a higher chance for issues like lack of contract visibility, missing contract deadlines, poor compliance, etc. to creep in. Enterprise Contract Management helps to bring all of your company’s commitments into a single system for streamlined management of all the contract processes. Enterprise Contract Management software in place helps Legal and Contract teams to organize a variety of contracts, clauses, and templates for efficient standardization and quick retrieval. It is a perfect solution for you if are:

A recent member survey by the World Commerce and Contracting says that:

Now let’s take a look at the top strategic reasons why you must invest in enterprise Contract Management:

A Centralized Hub for Your Contract Portfolio

An Enterprise CLM provides your team with a simple and easy way to search, find, track, manage and evaluate contracts in a centralized repository with metadata, tracking, and log information. It enables a single place to organize and store all contract-related information making it efficient to retrieve the information on-demand to keep contracts moving forward.

It enables a 360-degree view of all your contractual relationships in a single-page view with updates like key terms, clauses, and obligations. It also helps you keep track of metadata, alerts, reminders, activities, and workflows from a single contract repository with which you can easily find contract records, documents, or counterparties with a quick keyword search.

Efficient Contract Creation & Approval

A robust Enterprise Contract Management tool provides your teams with smart contract initiation benefits that integrate with your existing business programmes making no-touch contract management easier. Self-service contracting helps you improve cycle times, increase revenue and reduce legal operating expenses.

It automatically initiates contract creation by connecting buy-side and sell-side processes to auto-create contracts. Moreover, automated workflows make your contract approval processes even more efficient – You can quickly scan every contract at your organization to extract data about how efficient your company is when it comes to the contract approval process.

Digitize & Automate Your Contracts Process

From automating requests to eForms and digital reviews and approvals, the contracting process can be completely digitized across multiple contract types and for different divisions or departments in a single system. Automated Contract Management processes save hours of your administrative work by routing your review and approval workflows based on contract value, contract type, data, business area, standard or non-standard agreements, etc.

It allows you to add multiple stages in the review or approval phase for a well-structured process, guided to multiple users sequentially. You can also allocate tasks and workflows to the relevant users with the help of email notifications and dashboard alerts.

Increased Engagement of End-Users in the Contracts Process

End-user portals and self-service features, the ability to initiate contracts or requests with role-based templates, business user alerts, and approvals, etc. reduce work effort and cycle time for contracts and renewals.

Managing permission levels with e-signature functionality and multistage conditional routing for approval workflows help monitor and mitigate 3rd party risks. The integration with popular digital signature platforms like DocuSign and EchoSign provides the highest levels of security and universal acceptance.

Enhanced Compliance & Risk Management

A robust workflow system along with defined processes for standard and non-standard terms, contracts, and business areas makes it possible to implement complete contract compliance and risk management systems for the organization. A robust compliance framework around your contract processes, documents, and activity standardizes contract processes and improves contract visibility to avoid regulatory violations.

Assigning defaults in contract workflows, processes, permissions, templates, and ownerships for individual business divisions of your organization drives contract governance. Tagging contracts with non-standard positions and setting up auto-flagging based on conditions help in contract risk management.

Deeper Insights & Efficient Contracts Governance

The rich metadata, workflows, and lifecycle information captured during the electronic contracting process allow for better reporting and insights into your businesses while providing effective contract governance. Personalized dashboards for separate governance areas help legal teams manage information, enforce redaction or maintain non-disclosures.

It provides visibility to project and vendor management teams of key terms and clauses in the parent, general or blanket agreements while helping management teams with oversight and better sub-agreement compliance. It also helps your team set the right expectations for your contract relationships with timely information sharing, approvals, redactions, etc.

According to a report by IACCM, ineffective contract management costs the average business 9.2% of its annual revenue. So, clearly we can say that businesses need a collaborative, single source of contracting truth that allows seamless ongoing management and automation related to milestones, key deadlines, and other contract actions. An automated, cloud-based enterprise CLM solution can help you take full control of your contract processes.