The Road to Smarter Contracting – Technologies That Are Transforming Contract Management!
Today’s digital world demands smart and quick adaptation to modern technologies to stay relevant and competitive. Different types of technologies for CLM are being employed in contract negotiation, execution, and management to standardize and streamline Contract Management processes.
Technology can help transform the contract lifecycle by eliminating manual contract processing and optimizing the accuracy and efficiency of the process. According to a report by Aberdeen, contracting cycles are reduced in half through the use of automation. All this makes modern technologies much more significant in Contract Management.
Innovative CLM software solutions give you control over the entire spectrum of the contract management process, whether you manage one contract or thousands at a time. With a robust CLM strategy in place, your company can get the most value out of your contracts during each phase of the process.
– Salesforce
1. Intelligent Contract Authoring Tools
Having industry-standard compliant contract documents is essential to efficient Contract Management, but the manual authoring process isn’t capable enough due to its probability of human error and lack of digitization. Smart contract authoring tools enable a simple contract creation process using pre-approved contract templates, Word add-in and document automation features.
- Intelligent contract authoring tools integrate with services like MS Word for quick and convenient contract creation along with pre-approved templates with workflow help to improve consistency and governance
- Easily share documents securely with third parties for negotiation, compare contracts with redlining and accelerate legal reviews with workflows
2. Advanced Search Capabilities
With hundreds of contracts to manage, sorting through all of them and finding the ones you are looking for is essential, but it becomes a challenge due to the lack of efficient file tracking and search capabilities. Advanced search and tracking empowers professionals with efficient contract lifecycle management in the form of better insights into the contracts data and enhanced visibility.
- Advanced search enables simple and quick keyword search with smart filters like key provisions, contract metadata, keywords and phrase and boolean operators – AND, OR and NOT, greater, or less than, exact or partial match, and parameters such as result types, ownership, author or modified dates
- Makes your documents easily searchable providing a 360-degree visibility into commercial engagements
3. Contract Discovery, Reporting & Analytics – Power BI
It is essential to analyze data effectively to make informed decisions and have visibility into your contracts data, but the lack of an efficient centralized system in place to automatically review contracts and compliance issues hinders the process. The application of Power BI in Contract Management processes has massively improved the visualization capabilities for end-users who can now access embedded data on rich, interactive dashboards, without the extra effort for separate licensing, data security or infrastructure.
- Power BI aims to provide interactive visualizations and business intelligence capabilities
- Contract Discovery enables extraction of key information such as counterparties, renewal milestones, obligations, phrases and provisions from thousands of contract documents
4. Cloud Platforms
Keeping all the vital information, programs, and systems up and running on in-house computer servers is a challenging task due to the limited storage, lack of intelligent data management and security. That is the reason why cloud computing is being employed in areas like hosted email solutions, IT servers and CLM solutions to enable the delivery of computing services over the Internet.
- Cost-effective approach to scaling up as well as scaling out via the ability to replicate
- Cloud platforms like Azure enable secure cloud-based Contract Management platform with a comprehensive set of compliance offerings like certifications and attestations
- Highly secure with features like compliance, penetration alerts, transaction alerts, and vulnerability alerts
5. Automated Workflows & Alerts
Manual contract workflow management is an outdated process that requires Legal and Contract teams to personally oversee every contract lifecycle stage resulting in long contract cycle times and business inefficiency. Contract workflow automation is about employing an automated CLM software to run your contract workflows instead of needing your in-house legal team to manually move contracts through each step of the lifecycle process.
- Helps reduce contract lifecycle delays by engaging the ideal people at the right time with virtually unlimited contract notifications, automated alerts, and workflow task reminders
- Enables the utilization of user-defined fields, contract process management, reporting and analytics, audit trails, etc. helping cut the contract approval cycle time by minimizing potential bottlenecks
6. Artificial Intelligence
It’s no secret that it requires a lot of manpower to draft, execute, and improve the contracts as well as the contracting processes and the transactions these contracts govern. Intelligent technologies like AI focus on developing smart processes capable of performing tasks that typically require human intelligence. Artificial Intelligence has evolved and reached a stage where it has begun to create substantial impact across domains – Legal and Legal Tech is no exception, especially in Contract Lifecycle Management.
- Helps to extract data and clarify the content of contracts while helping in reviewing contracts much faster, organize and locate large amounts of contract data more easily
- Text analytics derives high-quality information from the written/unstructured text by recognizing the patterns
- Contract Discovery enables extraction of key information such as counterparties, renewal milestones, obligations, phrases and provisions from thousands of contract documents
7. Blockchain
Blockchain’s role in the Contract Management process is to replace a third party required to resolve a legal dispute. The value of blockchain stems from its ability to share data in a fast, secure way among entities without any one entity having to take responsibility for safeguarding the data or facilitating the transaction.
- Enables Immutability – a permanent, indelible, and unalterable history of transactions, turning the auditing process into a quick, efficient, and cost-effective procedure
- Adding an automated contract negotiation to an existing Blockchain Contract Management tool can optimize and speed-up complex transactions
8. Integration With ERP & CRM Systems
With the increased adoption to digital business processes, organizations look to connect their contract software to other business applications. It helps them to ease and automate business processes such as developing contract templates. ERP systems help minimize the number of communication failures and human errors while helping you with functions like – developing and customizing contract templates, establishing company-wide contract terms, and a lot more.
- CRM integrations like Salesforce enable efficient accessing, tracking, and managing of your sell-side contracts
- Helps to integrate your sales teams into a common contract governance fabric allowing you to integrate the sell-side contracting process, standards, and process directly into the CRM
Emerging technologies like Blockchain, improved e-signature platforms, multi-party digital web-browsers, etc. have made the Contract Management processes much more efficient and flexible than ever before. The future of Contract Management technology will continue to evolve along with the professionals who use it, the documents it processes, and the people who are creating it.
It’s important to consider the needs of your organization as thoroughly as you would examine the features and benefits of Contract Management tools. It helps you reduce operational costs, increase productivity, and exceed your client’s expectations, and that’s exactly what we help you with.
So, are you ready to take control of your contract processes?
