Integrate contract management with enterprise business applications

Many enterprises find their frontline (sales, support, and buyers) and back office (accounting, operations) teams to be disconnected and working in silos even in the context of same customer or vendor. While they rely heavily on mission-critical ERPs, CRM, accounting, inventory management and other business application systems the contractual relationship of the counterparty with the business is ignored as these transactions are processed.

The value of enterprise contract repositories increases abundantly when it is leveraged as a reference point that drives key business decisions such as customer renewals, supplier registration and ongoing transactions such as payment and obligation fulfillment.

Integration Mechanisms

Pre-Configured External Content Types and Master data

SharePoint Site columns (metadata) are created within SharePoint that match up to the external system metadata. The eContracts framework has prebuilt configurations for some of the common integration needs such as vendor or customer master, cost centers and projects for both cloud and on-premise based applications.

Real-time reference data

eContracts leverages Business Connectivity Services (“BCS”) feature to make seamless integrations possible through External Lists and External Content Types. These External Content Types and External Lists easily allow you to bring content from outside databases into the SharePoint to manage and display “live-data”.

The External List, which resides in SharePoint and stores the data according to an easily configurable data connection mapping. This list, once configured can be imagined as having the database table with SharePoint list interface. New external connections are established easily through SharePoint Data Source explorer feature which allows for searching of external database tables and mapping of table elements with the External list metadata.

Data and File exchange

eContracts can be customized to send and receive files from external systems. For example, flat files or spreadsheet can be exchanged for updating pricing information or transactions between contract management and payment applications. Similarly, signed contract documents can be posted and made available to ERPs and CRM users.